A Study Of Effect Of Orthography On The Chinese-English Access

The structure of the lexical information, lexical presentation and word processing all play an important role in language comprehension and language output. As bilingual learners, the differences between mother tongue and second language will have a direct influence on the second language (L2) learning.Word recognition is also called lexical access or vocabulary understanding, which refers to the process that people accept input of orthography, phonology information and output the meaning of the word in the brain through the auditory and visual way. The researches on second language vocabulary acquisition have developed quickly and become a hot topic in the second language acquisition research. Vocabulary is the foundation of learning a language and has a direct effect on language learners’ abilities.Chinese and English belong to two different language lexical systems, their representations are different from many aspects and they have or share little in common on the orthography. In the process of learning vocabulary, the existing knowledge of mother tongue lexical formation in our mind is bound to cause interference into second language vocabulary acquisition to some extent. These differences would give rise to the negative transfer, which means in learning a second language, learners will subconsciously use their mother tongue knowledge or learning strategies, when the structure of the two language are different, negative transfer or interference occurs and results in errors. Therefore, this paper uses contrastive analysis to compare the differences on the orthographic role in these two languages’ lexical access and finds the differences and gets the results to reduce negative transfer and improves the efficiency of learning vocabulary and guide foreign language teaching and learning.