The Effect Of Semantic Priming On Lexical Access Of College Students With Different English Levels

The basic unit of language is words, and the internal mechanism of lexical access inChinese-English bilingual research is one of the focuses among psycholinguists. How to use a wordis according to the class of a word which combines both related vocabulary and grammar. As two ofthe most important words in sentence structure, verbs and nouns play an important part in theEnglish word derivation. Mostly, verbs are used as a predicate, and nouns are used as a subject or anobject. As a result, they have a close relationship which is shown as subject-predicate andverb-object. For most of college students, the phenomenon of native language not only leads to lackof the knowledge of word class, but also has an effect upon acquisition of English grammar.Aiming at the effect of English levels on lexical access task, this article makes two experimentson college students from English major and non-English major with English-Chinese mask primingexperimental paradigm. In addition, it explores whether verbs can activate semantically relatednouns. Accordingly, it makes sure of the internal representations relationship of Chinese-Englishbilingual mental lexicons. The conclusions show:Firstly, there is a significant variation of college students in response results whether the targetstimulus is semantically related with the priming stimulus or not. The response time when the nounsare subjects and objects of the verbs are shorter, and the error rate when the nouns are subjects andobjects of the verbs are lower. In a word, English verbs play a remarkable linguistic priming effecton the semantically related Chinese nouns.Secondly, When the target stimulus is semantically related with the priming stimulus, that is tosay, when the following Chinese noun is the subject and object of the English verbs, there is asignificant variation in error rate between two English level groups of college students: the higherthe English level is, the lower the error rate is. However, the variation in response time betweenthem is not so significant. Besides, when the target stimulus is not semantically related with the priming stimulus, there is no significant variation in response time and error rate between twoEnglish level groups of college students.Thirdly, when the target stimulus is semantically related with the priming stimulus, the primingeffect on subject nouns activated by English verbs is less than that on object nouns. That is to say,compared with the access to object nouns, the access to subject nouns is more easily activated byrelated English verbs.Fourthly, conceptual representations for Chinese-English bilingual mental lexicon are sharedand lexical representations are separate. In other words, the results suggest that the lexicalrepresentation of the second language of college students could only access the conceptualrepresentation via the corresponding lexical representation of its first language. In addition, not onlyon conceptual representation, but also on lexical representation, the Chinese-English bilingualmental lexicon of the high English level group has stronger association and easier access to thesecond language than that of the low English level group.