| Lexical transfer is a hot issue in the field of second language acquisition.However,a majority of studies concerning lexical transfer only investigate the influence of first language on the acquisition of second language,few explore the influence of second language on the processing of first language,that is the reverse transfer.Although,some researches(e.g.Costa et al.,2000;Elston-Güttler et al.,2005;Haigh and Jared,2007;Javis,2009;Duyck and Warlop,2009;Degani and Tokowicz,2011;Poarch and Van Hell,2012)have been carried out to unveil the secret of lexical reverse transfer,these studies did not reach an agreement on the mechanism underlying reverse transfer because of the different participants and experiment methods adopted.In view of this,this study aims to explore the influence of English on the processing of Chinese shared-translation pairs from the perspective of multi-competence theory with the help of ERPs techniques.The following two questions are addressed:(1)Does reverse transfer occur in Chinese EFL learners when processing shared-translation semantically unrelated words?(2)Does reverse transfer occur in Chinese EFL learners when processing shared-translation synonyms?In order to answer the research questions,two reaction time experiments and two ERPs experiments were carried out.Experiment One was a Chinese within language lexical priming experiment.Materials included 30 pairs of shared-translation semantically unrelated Chinese words.And in each pair,one served as the prime word and the other was the target word.15 graduate students majoring in English were chosen as participants.They were required to perform a lexical decision task.The reaction time was recorded for data analysis.Experiment Two was almost the same with Experiment One.The main difference was that the English translation equivalent of a shared-translation pair was presented before the prime.Experiment Three was an ERPs experiment,which adopted an one factorial within subject design.Materials included 30 pairs of shared-translation synonyms which were made into sentences with their specific collocational usages.Sentences included three condition,namely,collocational congruent,collocational incongruent and control condition.And 18 English major graduate students serving as participants were asked to complete the on-line comprehension task,and EEG was recorded after the onset of the final word.Experiment Four was almost the same with Experiment Three.The only difference was that the English translation equivalent and its Chinese shared-translation synonyms were presented together at the very beginning.The materials,participants and tasks were the same with Experiment Three.All the experiments were conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in Sichuan International Studies University.The experimental procedure was programmed by the software E-prime and the ERPs results were collected and recorded by the software Neuroscan4.5.All the data were processed by the statistic software SPSS19.0.The results of three experiment are as follows:(1)The results of Experiment One showed that the reaction time of judging shared-translation targets and unrelated targets had no significant difference,t=.335,p=.743.This result indicated that English translation equivalents did not influence the processing of Chinese shared-translation semantically unrelated pairs.(2)The results of Experiment Two showed that there was a significant difference between the reaction time of judging shared-translation targets and unrelated targets,F(1,17)= 5.341,p=.034.It can be inferred from the results that under the English processing condition,the English knowledge can influence the comprehension of Chinese shared-translation semantically unrelated pairs.(3)The results of Experiment Three showed that there was a significant difference between the N400 amplitude under congruent condition and that under incongruent condition: F(1,134)=31.690,p=.000,indicating that participants can distinguish the semantic difference between shared translation Chinese synonyms,andthe English lexical knowledge cannot influence the processing of this kind of Chinese words.(4)The results of Experiment Four showed that the N400 amplitude under congruent condition was significantly different from that under incongruent condition:F(1,134)=4.107,p=.064,which indicated that with the induction of English,participants failed to distinguish the Chinese synonyms.In other words,the English translation equivalents influenced the processing of Chinese shared-translation synonyms.Based on the results of the above mentioned experiments,the present study may carefully draw the conclusion that the occurrence of lexical reverse transfer is conditional.Only in English processing mode,could the EFL learners be influenced by English lexical knowledge when processing Chinese shared-translation pairs. |
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