The Differenital Effects Of Phonological, Orthographical And Semantic Priming In Visual Lexical Recognition: A Study Based On Chinese English Majors

Visual word recognition, also called the semantic retrieval of visual word, playsan important role in the process of reading. In the visual word recognition, retrievalof lexical meaning is influenced by the effect of phonological, orthographic andsemantic information. It seems easy to retrieve the meaning of the word. In fact, theunderlying mental mechanism is very difficult to describe. With the development ofthe psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, more and more researchers try toexplore the mental mechanism underlying the process of word recognition.From these researches, it is found that the majority of studies pay more attentionto the word recognition of the native speakers regardless of foreign language learnersand researches about the developmental pattern of word recognition are limited. Tomake up the above-mentioned weakness, this study is to explore the developmentalword recognition pattern for Chinese English majors with the combination ofclassical research paradigm and modern experiment equipment. And the followingquestions are addressed.(1) In orthographic, phonological and semantic primingeffect for word recognition, which one plays the most important role in the ChineseEnglish majors with the same language proficiency?(2) With the increase of Englishproficiency, how do the effects change?In order to answer these questions, a priming experiment is administered upon8undergraduates of English majors in Grade Two from Sichuan International StudiesUniversity and8postgraduates of English majors in Grade Two from the sameschool in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience Foreign Language Learning. ERPstechnique was used to record the response time, brain data. The original sources ofbrain data were processed through ocular artifact reduction, epoch, baseline correctand so on. A picture of oscillogram from0ms to650ms was achieved. Finally, SPSS16.0was applied to analyze the behavior data and brain data. Through the analysis of results, it is found that the students withlower-proficiency are more likely to be interfered by orthographic effect, followed byphonological effect, and the semantic effect plays the least most important role inword recognition. However, for the higher-proficiency students, the role of theorthographic information decreases, and phonological information plays the mostimportant role. It may conclude that influenced by both processing pattern of Chineseand English, the orthographic effect is the main pathway for the lexical access. Withthe increase of English proficiency, they are more affected by the processing patternof English. Therefore, the phonological effect becomes the main pathway for thelexical access. The above findings support the Dual-route Hypothesis.