An Investigation Into The Recognition Process Of Auditory Words In Chinese EFL Learners' Mental Lexicon

Listening comprehension is one of the most essential activities in second language learning,which cannot be realized without auditory word recognition.This study starts from several phenomena common in Chinese EFL learners' learning,one of them being that quite a few learners have the experience of being able to recognize some words by sight,but cannot recognize them by sound,and another being that some learners often need to write down the auditory words first before they can recognize them.These phenomena reflect that Chinese EFL learners' ability of auditory word recognition is relatively weak compared with that of visual word recognition,and reflect the orthography's influence in auditory word recognition.Thus,this study attempts to investigate the recognition process of the auditory words by Chinese EFL learners and the orthography's role in this process,as well as the influence of word frequency and subjects' proficiency level on the recognition process of auditory words.A combination of the empirical research methods of think-aloud protocol and instant interview is employed to assist the investigation.It was found that the recognition process of auditory words can be categorized into four types concerning the time sequences of the activation of the three representations.Type 1 starts with the phonological activation,and the orthographic information is activated before the semantic recognition.In Type 2,after the activation of phonology,the orthographic and semantic representations are activated automatically at the same time and almost as quickly as phonological activation.Type 3 begins with phonological activation and then the semantic information is recognized directly.After the semantic recognition,the corresponding orthographic representation is also wholly or partially activated.Type 4 is very much like Type 3 without the later activation of the orthographic information.It is also found that the recognition process of the auditory words can be realized through two routes,the direct route and the indirect route,with regard to orthography's role in the process.Auditory word recognition through the direct route happens without significant orthography's facilitation,while that through the indirect route needs the activation of orthography as a medium in the direction from phonology to semantics.The word frequency and subjects' proficiency levels influence the recognition process greatly.As the word frequency decreases,the difficulty of the recognition of the three representations of the words increases,and the tendency of employing the indirect route with orthography's facilitation to recognize the target word also increases.Compared with non-English majors,English majors are more successful in recognizing all the three representations of the 40 words and are able to adopt both the direct route and the indirect route frequently,with the adoption of the direct route being more frequent,while the non-English majors are much more dependent on adopting the indirect route with orthography's facilitation to recognize auditory words.This research has significant implications for the explanation of the awkward situations Chinese EFL learners are in about auditory word recognition.And the analysis of the recognition process of auditory words and orthography's role in this process reflects their trained pattern and learning habit of memorizing new words.Hopefully,this study will offer some useful enlightenment to the practice of Chinese English listening teaching.