Phono-phonological Dependence In Vocabulary Recognition Among Chinese Second Language English Learner

According to the view of orthographic depth hypothesis,in the process of word recognition,people with shallow orthographic language backgrounds rely more on phonological information,while people with deep orthographic language backgrounds rely more on orthographic information.However,it is unclear which information Chinese ESL(English Second Language)speakers rely on to complete word recognition.In order to further explore this issue,the present study used the semantic category judgment task to manipulate the orthographic similarity and phonological similarity between the target word and the category example.Three experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of native orthographic experience,second language proficiency and reading mode on the orthographic and phonological dependence of Chinese English learners’ second language vocabulary recognition.In experiment 1,45 full-time college students with native Chinese and English as second language were selected as subjects.The 2(orthographic similarity : yes,no)×2(speech similarity :yes,no)within-subject experimental design was used to explore the dependence on orthography and phonology in the process of second language word recognition through the semantic category judgment task.The results showed that compared with the target words with similar orthographical examples,the participants had higher accuracy on the target words with dissimilar orthographical examples.For the target words that were similar to the speech of the category sample and the speech was not similar,there is no difference in the accuracy of the subjects under these two conditions.Based on Experiment 1,Experiment 2 further investigated the effect of second language proficiency on the orthography-phonology dependence of Chinese ESL learners ’ word recognition.In Experiment 2,46 participants were selected and a 2(orthographic similarity : yes,no)× 2(phonological similarity : yes,no)× 2(second language proficiency : high,low)mixed experimental design was adopted.It was found that only low-level subjects were disturbed by orthographic similarity,while high-level subjects did not differ in performing target words with similar orthographic and dissimilar orthographic.For target words that were similar to speech and dissimilar to the category samples,both high and low level subjects showed no difference in the two conditions.It suggested that the dependence of Chinese ESL speakers on orthography and phonology in word recognition is influenced by the Individual’s second language proficiency.In experiments 1 and 2,speech similarity did not play a role in second language word recognition,which may be due to the influence of experimental tasks on experimental results.Therefore,experiment 3 further explored the effect of the reading task on word dependence in Chinese ESL learners.In experiment 3,2(orthographic similarity: yes,no)×2(speech similarity:yes,no)two-factor within-subject experimental design was used.The results showed that the reading task did not change the reliance on orthography-phonology pattern during word recognition in Chinese ESL learners.Compared with target words similar to the orthography of the category sample,subjects judged more accurately on target words with dissimilar orthography.However,there was no significant difference in the performance of the subjects under these two conditions for the target words that were similar to the speech of the category sample and the speech was not similar.The results of three experiments showed that Chinese ESL learners are more dependent on orthographic information in the process of word recognition,but such dependence patterns are modulated by the second language proficiency,but not affected by the way of reading.This study supports and enriches the orthographic depth hypothesis,while also supporting the dual-route hypothesis.