Study On The English-Chinese Semantic Priming Effect Of Chinese Adult English Learners' Mental Lexicon

Mental lexicon, which is also known as the internal lexicon or mental dictionary, is a new concept of language recognition in cognitive psychology. It is not only commonly concerned by psycholinguists, neurolinguists and theoretical linguists, but also plays an increasing important role in linguistics and cognitive sciences. At present, Treisman (1960) is generally believed to be the first man to propose the hypothesis of mental lexicon. The hypothesis holds that each language user has a lexical representation which is orderly structured and can be accessed by certain procedures in people's psychology. The lexical representation is the mental lexicon, also known as the internal vocabulary or word order in human's brain and it is the dynamic organization of vocabulary in the brain. The researches on mental lexicon mainly include the representation, storage, retrieval, organization and development and other aspects of mental vocabulary. Mental lexicon has a unique set of experimental methods, which develop to be more scientific from the initially extensive ways. Semantic priming is the main paradigm to study semantic representation. Since the 80s of 20th century, different semantic priming experiments have been used to study the issue of bilingual representation. The theoretical basis of semantic priming is the"spreading activation model"proposed by Collins and Loftus. The semantic priming effect of Chinese-English bilinguals'mental lexicons is studied in the paper so as to find out the semantic connecting mode and features of English-Chinese mental lexicons.The adult English learners in the language acquisition studied in the paper are the ones who study English at the age of more than 12 years'old. According to the critical period hypothesis of language acquisition, language learning would be very difficult for learners who missed the critical language learning period (childhood). The first chapter of the paper analyzes the characteristics of language acquisition and the English learning and describes the bilingualism and the bilingual mental lexicons. Chapter Two reviews the mental lexicon and the semantic priming effect at home and abroad. Chapter Three, theoretical framework, explains hierarchical network model, spreading activation model, feature-comparison model of semantic memory and"Bilingual Double Structures"so as to explore the relationship between these theories and the mental lexicon. According to"Bilingual Double Structures", before the adults learned a foreign language, there has already been strong knowledge and thinking of mother language in their minds. Therefore, the knowledge and the fixed mode of thinking have formed a relatively stable mental lexicon of mother language. In the process of foreign language learning, the mental lexicon of foreign language will be formed in the interrelation and interaction with the mental lexicon of mother language. Chapter Four verifies the above theories through three experimental researches. The first experiment analyzes the different associations and thinking process between two languages and within languages by the single association and continuous association. Experiment 2 studies the impact of mother language and thinking on the foreign language through translation exercises. Experiment 3 is carried out to explore whether the semantic priming effects of English and Chinese mental lexicons are obvious through the semantic priming experiment. Chapter Five analyzes the mental lexicon and semantic priming of adult English learners from the theoretical perspective. Chapter Six is the conclusion, which summarizes the paper in theory and in practice to reveal the implication of mental lexicon and semantic priming on teaching.The key points of the paper are how the mental lexicons of native and foreign languages represent and how the semantics of the two languages are primed. Based on the theoretical analysis and experimental studies, the following conclusions were reached:1)The bilinguals understand the information of different languages through mutual translation in the conceptual level. Beginners will store the foreign language knowledge in the foreign language mental lexicon at the beginning, while the semantic knowledge is established by means of mother language. With continuous English learning, adult learners are gradually building the separate semantic systems. Therefore, bilingual mental lexicons are a dynamic system from shared semantic representation to separate semantic representation.2)The prime and activation of bilingual mental lexicons of Chinese adult English learners mainly embody in the five levels: graphemic level, phonological level, semantic level, morphological level and syntactic level. In every one of the five levels, there are bilingual prime and activations, thus the word association has different association results in the five levels.3)The experiments find that the semantic association is the main form of priming and association in the mental lexicon, there are semantic priming effects between the bilingual mental lexicons, but also accompanied by the weak negative priming. The semantic priming effect has promoting effects on the bilingual mental lexicon, and the negative priming effect disturbs the bilingual mental lexicon. The promotion and interference result in the shortest reaction time when the words have the same semantic meaning. When the words have non-semantic links, the reaction time is short, but when the words have moderate semantic links, the reaction time is the longest.4)The results of word association embody the interaction between subjects and objects. The language knowledge is grown upon the"language seed and language acquisition tree"by absorbing the"experience, customs and other nutriments"in the daily lives. Therefore, vocabulary association indicates the characteristic of personal experience, language features, life experience and background and so on, forming a changing process.The deep study of the mental lexicon will help to further explain the representation and access of bilingualism, and then to further demonstrate the"Bilingual Double Structures". The study of mental lexicon will have positive realistic significance and directive function for the improvement of vocabulary teaching and language skills of second language in theory and practice.