Orthographic Neighborhood Effects, Word Frequency And Word/Nonword Factors In Chinese ESL Learners' English Word Recognition

The current study investigates: (1) orthographic neighborhood effects, word frequency, and word/nonword factors in Chinese ESL learners' English word recognition in a lexical decision task; (2) the impact of Chinese ESL learners' second language (L2) proficiency and gender difference on their English word recognition.The same experimental paradigm and stimuli are used as by van Heuven, Dijkstra, and Grainger (1998). Experimental stimuli vary along three dimensions: (1) words with high/low neighborhood density; (2) words with high/medium/low frequency; (3) words and nonwords.The study shows that Chinese ESL learners perform the best (have the lowest reaction times and the highest accuracy) using real words with high neighborhood density and high frequency. With the same lexical decision paradigm and stimulus materials, the present study finds the same facilitatory effects of neighborhood density, but different effects of word frequency in certain aspects, and the same inhibitory effects to nonwords.With respect to the L2 proficiency of Chinese ESL learners, in terms of ACC, highly-proficient Chinese ESL learners perform better (have higher accuracy) using words with N, F, words/nonwords factors than low-proficient ones, while gender does not reveal any difference among the participants in this study. The study also shows that higher L2 proficiency facilitates Chinese ESL learners' English word recognition in a lexical decision task blocked by N, F, words/nonwords factors.Although HP participants perform better than LP participants in the experiment, highly-proficient Chinese ESL learners are able to exert higher degree of control over the relative activity of their lexica still needs further research. Although some result patterns of the current study are in favor of the nonselective-access-integrated-lexicon hypothesis and the BIA model of the bilingual lexicon in the previous studies, the mental mechanisms to better explain the word recognition process of Chinese ESL learners await more future investigations.