The Effect Of Semantic Priming Of Homograph Under Differfent Language Conditions

The memory research had made great progress in the mid 20th Century, in which one of the important branches is the exploration of the priming effect, along with the rise of the cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychologists attempt to validate Freud's concept of unconsciousness from the view of empirics as the research return to consciousness. The semantic priming effect belongs to implicit memory in nature. The early explorations, however, mainly concentrated on the word recognition and lexical organization and generally study the lexical access and semantic representation by cognitive tasks, such as lexical decision.The development of priming technique has provided a powerful bolster for exploring semantic priming as researcher's efforts go forward. Breakthrough of the techniques in other relevant field, for example, brain imaging technique, has provided a good opportunity for exploring the brain mechanism of semantic priming. The research of semantic priming is a channel connecting cognitive psychology and neural psychology, which isolated mutually in the past, as well as the key area of the cognitive neural science exploring. As conducting research effectively in the past 20 and 30 years, semantic priming study maybe promotes different areas'research going forward and amalgamating them up, macroscopically setting up a unified theoretic framework connecting the attention, consciousness, and the memory, as well as the thought and language, which surpassing different microcosmic opinions.The semantic representation and lexical access have universal laws too.The semantic experimental research from the empirical view is not very thorough yet though Chinese semantic research has a very long history, and modern research is influenced heavily by the western language theory based on alphabetic writing system to a larger degree. The Chinese character is isolated and not changing in its form actually, so that different from the alphabetic writing system having inflexion completely, which belongs to The Indo-European Family. Chinese(Mandarin's writing system) is regarded as a kind of isolated language by some western scholars, and dose not have its own linguistic theory yet, almost all come from outside. Therefore, it is necessary to combine western language theory with Chinese research to reveal rules of its structure and evolution, as well as clarifying its universal theoretic significance.Semantic representation and language information processing are heated issues in modern Cognitive psychology and psycholinguistic research as the exploration of the meaning problem and semantic priming could help us better understand the complex mechanism of human language comprehension. The current research attempts to provide answers to the following questions:⑴how word recoganization is affected by SOA, relative semantic frequency and priming type;⑵how relative frequency and priming type influence semantic priming effect;⑶the nature of meaning and its role played in the word recogization.Two experiments are reported to exam the effect of SOA, relative semantic frequency and priming type on semantic priming effect, the present research employs Lexical decision task by manipulating the word frequency and semantic relevant degree. Experiment 1 focused on the effect of SOA, relative frequency and priming type on semantic priming effect, which adopted a 2 (SOA: 250ms; 500ms)×2 (relative semantic frequency: major meaning; subordinate meaning) ×2 (priming type: relevant priming; irrelevant priming) mixed factorial design. SOA is between-subjects variable, relative semantic frequency and priming type are within-subject variables. Experiment 2 explored the same effect of SOA, relative semantic frequency and priming type on semantic priming effect under different language conditions, the design of experiment 2 was the same as that of Experiment 1. SOA is between-subjects variable, relative semantic frequency and priming type within-subject variables.The results indicated:(1) SOA has no effects on subjects'lexical decision, and there is no difference between long SOA and short SOA on RT (reaction time) and CR (correct rate) ;(2) Relative semantic frequency has effects on meaning access of Chinese homograph;(3) Priming type influence the subjects'lexical decision and (4) Meaning plays a key role in lexical access, there is difference between semantic priming under different language conditions, and exists corss-language semantic priming.