A Study Of Lexical Competition Effects In Noun And Verb Generation: Evidence From Chinese-english Bilinguals

Recently, a number of studies on the lexical competition effects in noun and verb generation in English and other Indo-European languages have been carried out and yielded significant results. The existing evidence to some extent discounts the role of lexical competition effects of alphabetic languages in word generation. However, to the best of knowledge, no studies have been conducted to examine the lexical competition effects of Chinese-English bilinguals during word generation tasks. As a primarily pictographic or ideographic language, Chinese varies substantially from the alphabetic languages. The previous studies with a variety of methods have investigated the lexical competition effects involved in word generation tasks and either the effects of selection demands or the effects of association strength were emphasized during their studies. Moreover, few studies have investigated the long-term repetition priming effects in noun and verb generation tasks among bilingual speakers.In view of this, our experiment was designed to explore the lexical competition effects in noun and verb generation tasks among Chinese-English bilinguals. Moreover, we used a repetition priming paradigm to better reveal the lexical competition effects during word generation.Specifically, our study was designed to explore the following questions:(1) Are there long-term repetition priming effects for Chinese and English during word generation tasks?(2) Are there any effects of selection demands or association strength for Chinese and English during word generation tasks?To answer the above questions, we conducted two repetition priming experiments(one for noun generation and another experiment for verb generation) and then analyze Chinese-English bilinguals’ response latencies of noun and verb generation quantitatively. Participants of the experiment are English major undergraduates studying at Ningbo University. Results indicated that effects of selection demands and association strength were present for Chinese and English in noun and verb generation tasks, indicating there were lexical competition effects. Moreover,for both Chinese and English verb and noun generation tasks, the mean reaction times(RTs) of studied words were significantly shorter than those of non-studied words, indicating there were priming effects.The results in this study are expected to contribute to the fields of bilingual lexical competition during word production from theoretical and pedagogical perspectives.Theoretically, the present study reveals the complex nature of the lexical competition effects and the long-term repetition priming effects during noun and verb generation tasks among Chinese-English bilinguals, and thus, further enriches the research on bilingual lexical competition in word generation. Pedagogically, the results of the experiment will provide facilitation to L1 and L2 vocabulary teaching.