The Influence Of Readers’ Language Proficiency On Their Relative Awareness Of Conceptual Relations Among Concrete Words In And Out Of Sentential Contexts

Human beings’relative awareness of taxonomic and thematic associations cannot only be influenced by age, culture, education, but also by the contexts in which the words or entities appear. In order to examine how readers’ relative awareness of these two types of conceptual relations among concrete words in and out of sentential contexts, a series of 8 experiments were conducted in the present study. In four experiments the self-paced reading paradigm was adopted, and in the other four experiments the lexical decision paradigm was applied.In a self-paced reading task, two words that were thematically or taxonomically related were embedded in a sentence in a trial. The participants’reaction times (RTs) to each word were recorded. In a priming task of lexical decision, the stimuli were two words that were thematically or taxonomically related in a trial, and the participants’reaction times to the target were recorded.The participants in Experiment 1 were non-English major undergraduates and the language (Chinese or English) in which the sentence materials were presented was manipulated as a variable. The results showed that the participants’RTs were significantly shorter for the thematically than for the taxonomically related target words in English. Probably because of their intermediate or less than intermediate proficiency in English, the participants seemed to have more relied on the sentence context in the thematic than in the taxonomic condition. They had a high level of proficiency in Chinese, however, and their RTs appeared to have yielded a ceiling effect.Experiment 2 consisted of two sub-experiments. In Experiment 2a and 2b, the participants were seventh-grade students and graduate students who majored in English linguistics. The seventh-grade students were required to read the Chinese sentences that were used in Experiment 1, and the graduate students the English sentences. The results of Experiment 2a are largely similar to those of Experiment 1 when the stimuli were in Chinese. Similarly, the results of Experiment 2b indicated no significant difference in the participants’RTs when the conceptual relations were changed from thematic associations to taxonomic relations. That is, the graduates’ relatively high level of proficiency in English seemed to have prevented them from relying on the sentential context in being aware of the conceptual relations between the critical words.Experiment 3 was composed of 4 sub-experiments, in each of which a priming task of lexical decision was adopted. The participants were non-English major undergraduates in Experiment 3a and 3b, were seventh-grade students in Experiment 3c and were graduate students in English linguistics in Experiment 3d. The stimuli were in Chinese in Experiment 3a and 3c and in English in Experiment 3b and 3d. The result showed no significant differences between the participants’performance on the thematically and the taxonomically related stimuli in Chinese, in agreement with the theoretical prediction. The participants’RTs were significantly longer for the thematic than for the taxonomic targets in Experiment 3b. The non-English major undergraduates tended to have a stronger awareness of taxonomic than of thematic associations among concrete words in English, consistent with Li, Li, and Yuan (2010). Although the stimuli were also presented in English in Experiment 3d, however, the participants’performance did not seem to have been influenced by the different types of conceptual relations between the concrete words in English. The reason might be similar to the case of Experiment 2b.Experiment 4 compared the different degrees of influence of sentential context on non-English major undergraduates’relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations when the stimuli were presented in Chinese and English. The materials of Experiment 1 were adopted with more words inserted between the key words in each sentence. The results showed that the participants’RTs to the. middle words were significantly shorter in the thematic than in the taxonomic condition when the sentences were presented in English, but their RTs to the targets were not significantly different across the two conceptual conditions. These two results in combination suggested that the participants’dependence on the sentential context could last for a limited time.In conclusion, the relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations among concrete words is influenced by the readers’ level of proficiency of the language in the stimuli are presented. More interesting it is also influenced by whether or not the thematically or taxonomically related words were embedded in a sentential context.