An Experimental Study Of Learning Novel English Word-forms In Chinese EFL Learners

People in their childhood can rapidly learn a large number of words;similar processes can take place later in life in second language acquisition.Rapid acquisition of new words is an essential ability which enables us to acquire a vocabulary of thousands of words.Phonology is an important and a fundamental element for any language;therefore,learning the phonological knowledge of a novel word is a crucial component of acquiring a novel word.Many previous studies on native novel word learning have suggested that the phonological learning of new words requires the offline consolidation,especially the integration after a period of sleep.This result is consistent with an important theory of word learning –Complementary Learning Systems(CLS)(Mc Clelland,Mc Naughton,& O’Reilly,1995)which explains that there are two stages of lexical acquisition: rapid and initial familiarization by medial temporal and hippocampus,and slow lexical consolidation by the neocortex.But in recent years,several new behavioral studies have demonstrated that the phonological representations of newly learned words can be immediately integrated with existing lexical knowledge without the offline consolidation.After researching a lot of literature,we have discovered that most previous studies about new word forms learning are all conducted by using native language as experimental materials.How human brains learn the novel word forms in L2 or foreign languages remains unknown.The current study tried to fill this gap and to explore whether Chinese EFL learners could rapidly learn the phonological representations of novel foreign language words(refer to English in the current study).English novel words were used as experimental materials in this study,two experiments were included,and phonological priming paradigm was employed as an experimental technique.Phonological priming paradigm refers that a prior word form(prime,usually a novel spoken word)will influence language users to judge the existence of the latter word form(target,usually a real spoken word with similarphonological information to the prime),i.e.the reaction time of the target becomes longer or shorter.Therefore,there are two priming effects – facilitatory and inhibitory priming.Facilitation effect is represented as that novel spoken words facilitate the recognition of real spoken words and the reaction times of real words become shorter;on the contrary,inhibitory priming effect manifests as longer reaction times on real spoken words,which is the result of “lexical competition”between novel spoken words and the known words with phonologically similarity.Experiment 1 consisted of two sessions – the familiarization session(phoneme monitoring task)and test session(lexical decision task).Participants firstly familiarized new spoken words with phonological similarity to real words(e.g.,admoth /?d’m?θ/ derive from admire),with other phonologically similar real words,dissimilar real words and novel words as fillers.In the lexical decision test,participants were asked to decide whether the second word-form(target)in a pair of prime and target was existing word(e.g.,admoth /?d’m?θ/ – admire,to decide the existence of “admire”).In Experiment 2,participants(did not participate in Experiment 1)only performed the lexical decision test.Through comparing the results of the two experiments,we tried to explore the different priming effects of words that were trained previously and not trained,and to find out whether newly learned novel spoken word could induce lexical competition effects with real spoken words just as real words with similar sounds did.The experimental results demonstrated that for half of the participants,real word primes and real word targets with phonological similarity could form inhibitory priming effects no matter whether the real word primes were trained or not trained before the lexical decision task;and for the other half of participants,facilitatory priming effects were produced between real word primes and their sound-similar real word targets no matter whether the real word primes were familiarized before the test session.For half of the participants whose response of recognizing real word targets was inhibited by the real word primes with phoneme overlaps in the two experiments,the trained novel spoken words in Experiment 1also inhibited the recognition of realword target with phonological similarity,which suggests that newly learned spoken words can immediately generate lexical competition with real words with phoneme overlaps from the onset of words after a brief exposure,i.e.the phonological forms of novel English words can be rapidly learned for these Chinese EFL learners;while the untrained novel spoken words in Experiment 2 speeded up the identification of real spoken word targets with phoneme overlaps,suggesting that facilitatory priming effects were formed.However,for the other half of participants whose response of identifying real word targets were facilitated by the sound-similar real word primes in two experiments,neither the trained nor untrained novel spoken words formed priming effects on their real word targets with phonological overlaps,indicating that novel spoken words cannot be rapidly learned for these Chinese EFL learners.The results of this study suggest: for those Chinese EFL learners whose response to the real words with phonological similarities from the onsets of words can form lexical competition,novel words can be rapidly learned,while for those EFL learners whose reactions to the phonologically similar real words are facilitation,novel words cannot be rapidly learned.