Semantic Processing Of Homonyms By Chinese College Students With Different English Levels

Ambiguity is something shows uncertainty of semantic meaning, which is a common phenomenon that exists in the language expression. Semantic ambiguity refers to an isolated lexical item has more than one interpretation so that caused several identifications of language meaning. In light of lexical ambiguity, there are for two types of lexical ambiguity in English; they are homonym item and polysemy word. In 2007, Klepousnintou and Baum attempted to gain the advantage of polysemy to explain lexical ambiguity effects. A Chinese scholar, Yang (1994) classified homonym item into three types, which is homonymous, homophone and homograph.This empirical study is attempting to explore the semantic processing procedures of homonyms item in terms of accuracy and response time so that to reveal the difference between English learners of the high level group and the low level group. Additionally, this research also attempts to investigate whether language levels and types of stimuli exert influence on the semantic processing of homonyms.In this research, E-prime would adopt as the tool to collect correct frequency and reaction time of participants. Two lexical decision tasks were included in this investigation and experiment time for each participant last about 15 minutes. Twenty university students who failed CET 4 and twenty postgraduate students who passed TEM 8 were chosen as participants. Materials were divided into two groups:1) the homophone group including 20 pairs of words and 20 pairs of sentences; and 2) 20 pairs of words and 20 pairs of sentences were included in the homograph group.Experimental data showed that different levels of English learners did exert significant influence on the semantic processing of homonyms, high level of English learners exert higher accuracy on correct frequency and the shortest time in response time. What's more, as for the two types of stimuli, there did not exert significant influence and difference in terms of response time and correct frequency. Last but not the least, different English learners have a better performance on the semantic processing of homophone items in terms of response time and correct frequency.On account of the contradiction between two levels of English learners, it is reasonable to believe that language levels did exert a significant difference on the semantic processing of homonym items.