The Directional Forgetting Effect Of Cross-language In Different Proficiency Levels

How to process the Chinese-English has been highly concerned by bilingual psycholinguists. The previous studies have found that the bilingual of different levels will yield different inhibition ability, and thus influence their performance of vocabulary memory and storage. And in the related studies of directed forgetting, scientists have found the obvious inhibiting effects. In the experiments the participants are presented a series of materials, and ask them to remember some of the words and forget the others. When ask them to recall all of them, the performance in the memory group is much better than that of the forgetting group. Maybe the differences in the cognitive inhibition, also directly affect the selective memory. Some studies have found that when the materials are semantic-related, the extraction and processing results will be different.Based on the research background, we try to use the item-method directed forgetting method to explore the cross-language effects in the Chinese-English bilingual of different proficiency. Our research matches the semantic-related and semantic-unrelated words between Chinese and English to discuss the differences in the inhibitory ability of the different proficiency bilinguals.The research consists of two experiments, using 2(Bilingual proficiency level: bilingual skilled,unskilled) x 2(language: Chinese, English) x 2(cue type: remember, forget) design of experiment, the dependent variable is the recognition accuracy of the subjects. Materials chosen for Experiment 1 are without semantic association, while the materials in experiment 2 have semantic association. Through the experiments, this study may draw the conclusions as follows:(1)When the experimental materials don't exist semantic association, the main effect of indicating type is notable.The recognition accuracy of memory group is significantly higher than that of the forgetting group.The main effect of corrected category is not obvious.The rate of Chinese recognition accuracy is slightly higher than that of English.The interaction between indicating type and bilingual proficiency level is significant.Under the condition of memory,the rate of vocabulary recognition of skilled bilingual participants is higher than that of the unskilled.Under the condition of forgetting,the rate of vocabulary recognition of the skilled bilingual participants is lower than that of the unskilled.That is to say,the directed forgetting effect of the skilled is more notable and the inhibition ability is stronger.(2)When the materials are semantic-related,the main effect of indicating type is significant.There is a clear effect of directed forgetting.Compared with experiment one,the directed forgetting effect decreases to some extend.It proves that semantic association between words have an impact to the directed forgetting effect.It reduces the directed forgetting effect.There is a significant interaction between language and bilingual proficiency. On the matter of the rate of Chinese recognition accuracy,there is no significant difference between the skilled bilingual participants and the unskilled.But the rate of English recognition accuracy of the skilled is significantly higher than that of the unskilled.