On English Lexical Retrieval Process From The Perspective Of Tot

Speech production is the most difficult research subject in psycholinguistics as it involves the internal cognitive process from thought to language which is quite complicated and hard to assess. Therefore, collecting some phenomena in speech production which can be spotted in our daily speech, such as the-tip-of-tongue, speech error, pause and so on, and then studying when and how those phenomena happen has become one of most effective ways for psycholinguists to investigate the process of speech production. Because Lexical retrieval is an indispensable stage in producing utterances, no matter whether the speaker is monolingual or bilingual, he has to retrieve the semantic, phonological, and syntactic information of the desired word, whereby correct and continuous speech production can be ensured.The tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT for short), which has received great attention from psycholinguists, refers to the situation when one wants to use certain word to express himself, yet he can not succeed in recalling it. This situation has been regarded as a quite commonplace language phenomenon in speech production. However, most of the previous researches on the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon have been confined to native language speakers. Compared with the cognitive process of monolingual speakers, the cognitive process of bilingual speakers in speech production are far more complicated because the latter involves the interference from the first language or the mother tongue. Up to present, there are few studies touching on this.The current research uses TOT as a window to explore the lexical retrieval feature, to be more specific, the semantic, phonological and syntactic traits of CLEs. The experiment analyzes the subject's performance in recalling syntactic and phonological information of target words when they are in the positive TOT (Ptot) state, and the two"Don't know"states. The findings are as follows: When subjects are shown the definition of a word, most of them report that what they initially activate in their mind is the Chinese word with the similar definition, and then they transform the Chinese word into the corresponding English word. When subjects are in the Ptot state, their performances in correct retrieval of the phonological information are significantly better than their performances in both"Don't know"states. What's more, under the Ptot state, by comparing the subjects'performances in recalling the syntactic information when the subjects correctly retrieve the phonological information with their performance in recalling the syntactic information when they fail to retrieve the phonological information, the author finds no significant difference. Meanwhile, the opposite direction is also been tested. Comparison of the subjects'performances in recalling the phonological information when the subjects correctly retrieve the syntactic information with their performances in recalling the phonological information when they fail to retrieve the syntactic information does not show significant difference.The above findings imply that when CLEs are processing a word, in most cases the corresponding Chinese meaning of the target word will be activated initially, and then they move to next stage searching for the corresponding English word; as for the syntactic and phonological process, they are independent from each other, and there is neither syntactic nor phonological mediation involved in the lexical retrieval process; In addition, the previous studies taking the native speakers as subjects show that the subjects'performances in retrieving syntactic information in the Ptot state differ significantly from their performances in both"Don't know"states or the negative TOT state. While the current experiment uses bilingual speakers with English as their foreign language and Chinese as their mother tongue as the subjects, and the result shows that there is no significant difference in subjects'recalling the lexical syntactic information among different states. The results signify that the syntactic information of the word may have been projected by bilingual's mother tongue (for Chinese meaning will initially be activated).