A Cross-language Semantie Priming Experimental Study Of Chinese College Student’s Bilingual Mental Lexicon

Since the acquisition of vocabulary plays a central role in learning a foreign language, the learning of vocabulary can be seen as the core of second language acquisition (SLA). Mental lexicon, which is also known as the internal lexicon or mental dictionary, has explained how words are organized and accessed in human brain from the angle of psycholinguistics. The phenomenon of semantic priming effects, which reflects the storage distance or link strength between words, has been widely noticed in the study of second language mental lexicon. The researches of semantic priming have revealed several properties of the bilinguals’mental lexicon and greatly benefit the teaching of second language vocabulary.This study examined the cross-language semantic priming effects in Chinese non-English-major students’ L2mental lexicon. Three experiments of lexical decision tasks were designed using the masked priming paradigm. The results revealed some properties of the bilinguals’ mental lexicon and the problems existing in the English vocabulary acquisition. In-experiment1, the prime words were English and the target words were also English. There was an obvious semantic priming effect within Chinese learners’English when the primes and the targets were semantically related, which indicated that Chinese students’ English mental lexicon was stored with semantic links in a spreading activation models. In experiment2, the prime words were Chinese and the target words were English. In experiment3, the prime words were English and the target words were Chinese. The results showed the cross-language semantic priming effects were obvious from Chinese primes to English targets, while there were no obvious priming effects from the reverse direction. Asymmetrical cross-language priming occurred, in which there were stronger effects from L1to L2, than from L2to L1. It could be concluded that:(1) the Chinese English learners’ first and second language semantic information is stored and retrieved from a shared semantic system. And Chinese students’ English mental lexicon is stored with semantic links in a spreading activation model;(2) the lexical representation of Chinese-English bilinguals’second language can not only directly access its concept representation, but also indirectly access its concept representation through the lexical representation of the first language. But the bilinguals tend to rely on the help of the Chinese equivalents while processing English. These findings may indicate that even for some non-English major students who have passed the CET-4, their English mental lexicon is still subject to the influence of Chinese. The Chinese mediation effects have been a serious impediment to the further development of language proficiency. Thus teachers need to minimize the students’dependence on native language in learning English, and to enhance the conceptual links between their English vocabulary and the shared conceptual system.