An ERP Study On Processing Of English Compound Words By Chinese Native Speakers

Morphology is an important part in linguistic research,and the neural mechanism of morphological processing is one of the hot issues in language acquisition field.Most studies in this area have focused on whether and in what situations morphologically complex words are decomposed and whether the constituent morphemes are activated.However,morphological processing likely involves not only the processing of specific morphemes but also the processing of the relations of the composed morphemes,i.e.,the morphological structure relation.When a word is processed following the morphological route,the activated morphemes should be combined in accordance with a specific structure,such that the meaning of the whole word can be obtained.At present,the morphological structure information is not yet clear how is processing.For the second language learners,further studies are still wanted on whether morphological structure and its productivity affect the second language lexical acquisition or not.Regarding the unsolved problems in the academic field,two experiments in this paper are designed to investigate the effect of morphological structure and its productivity on English compounds processing for Chinese native speakers.By applying the technology of Event Related Potential(ERP)and a visual priming lexical decision task,Chinese English learners in advanced proficiency are selected as the study subjects.The results of experiment one show that the reaction time of compound words with same morphological structure is smaller than compound words with different morphological structure;the P200 amplitude of compound words with same morphological structure is larger than compound words with different morphological structure;the N400 amplitude of compound words with same morphological structure is smaller than compound words with different morphological structure;the reaction time of compound words with semantically relevant is smaller than compound words with semantically unrelated;the N400 amplitude of compound words with semanticallyrelevant is smaller than compound words with semantically unrelated.The results of experiment two show that in the real word condition,the N400 amplitude of synthetic compound words with high productivity is smaller than root compound words with low productivity;in the condition of false word,the reaction time of synthetic compound pseudo-words with high productivity is larger than root compound pseudo-words with low productivityThe results of this paper indicate that: First of all,semantic relation affects the speed and intensity of compound words processing.Semantic related compound words can be recognized faster and the processing difficulty is lower.Secondly,morphological structure relation affects the speed and intensity of compound words processing.Compound words with different morphological structure can be recognized faster and the processing difficulty is lower;for bilinguals with high proficiency level of second language,they can perceive and detect morphological structure of the English compound word in the early stages of visual word recognition;there is independent morphological structure representation in the brain of second language learners.Lastly,morphological productivity affects the speed and intensity of compound words processing.In the real word condition,the processing difficulty of compound words with high morphological productivity is lower;in the condition of false word,the processing speed of compound words with high morphological productivity is slower.