An Experimental Study On Cross-language Semantic Priming Effect Under Different Category Levels

Bilingual processing and representation are heated topics of debate for psycholinguists,which include many studies about the cross-language semantic priming effect.This thesis carries out experimental analysis on this psychological phenomenon from the perspective of semantic category levels,and English and Chinese are chosen as the object of distinctive linguistic forms.These relevant experimental studies and results have hardly been found by now.In this study,30 freshmen majoring in English and 30 junior students majoring in English are chosen to conduct the lexical decision task with Chinese and English paradigms under different category levels,in order to verify the cross-language semantic priming effect.Then further discussion is made upon bilinguals' processing mechanism of conceptual vocabulary and their representation style.This study includes two experiments.Experiment one is a two-factor design as the control group,which offers a reference for the experiment group.One factor is the higher and lower English proficiency,and the other is the English and Chinese paradigm.Experiment two is a three-factor design as the experiment group.Compared with experiment one,semantic category level is the extra factor which includes the same category level and the different category level.This aims to test and verify the existence of cross-language semantic priming effect under different category levels.Thus it helps to draw a conclusion upon subjects' processing mechanism of bilingual vocabulary and representation style.Based on the above experiments,the following results have been obtained:(1)The reaction time and error rates with priming words are significantly lower than those without priming words for both groups of higher and lower English proficiency,showing the existence of cross-language semantic priming effect.(2)The reaction time and error rates under the same category levels are significantly lower than those under different category levels for both two English proficiency groups and two paradigms.This shows that the same category level can promote the recognition of the conceptual words,while the different category level can not.(3)The reaction time and error rates of higher proficiency English group are significantly lower than those of lower proficiency English group.This shows that English proficiency level plays an important role in the lexical decision task.(4)The reaction time and error rates of the Chinese paradim,which is the subjects' mother tongue,are not lower than those of the English paradigm.While in many cases,the opposite is true.This happens on both higher and lower English proficiency groups.This shows that subjects' mother tongue does not promote the access of conceptual words.The asymmetric phenomenon of semantic priming effect has little impact on the subjects in this experiment.Meanwhile,it also proves that lexical access for this level of bilinguals has achieved the stage of concept mediation model.The study concludes that when conducting the lexical decision task,the cross-language semantic priming effect is very significant for the bilinguals,and the effect for the same category levels is more significant than that for the different category levels,which shows shared storage of conceptual words on bilinguals.