An ERP Contrastive Study Of Han-Chinese And Korean-Chinese College Students' English Word Recognition

The word recognition refers to the retrieval of the lexical meaning.In the process of word recognition,the extraction of word sense is affected by the activation effect of orthography,phonology and semantics.In the process of word recognition,the core issues are as followings:what information is firstly extracted?when is it extracted?Through the combination of traditional classical experiments and EEG technology,this study explored the cognitive processing mechanism of English word recognition by Han-Chinese and Korean-Chinese students of different English proficiency.This paper attempts to answer the following questions:(1)For Han-Chinese college students,is there any differences and what are the differences in the phonological,morphological,and semantic activation effects with different levels of English proficiency?(2)For Korean-Chinese college students,is there any differences and what are the differences in the phonological,morphological,and semantic activation effects with different levels of English proficiency?In order to answer these questions,we made the experimental design:2(Mother tongue:Han,Korean)×2(English proficiency:high level,low level)×4(Priming type:orthographically similar(Type1),phonologically similar(Type2),semantically related(Type3)and unrelated(Type4)).A priming experiment is administered upon 14 Han-Chinese college students from Yanbian University and 14 Korean-Chinese college students from the same school.Among Han-Chinese college students,there are 7 students passed TEM4 and 7 students passed CET4,which is the same for Korean-Chinese college students.An ERPs experiment was administered on the word recognition to record the response time,accuracy and brain data.The original sources of brain data were processed through ocular artifact reduction,epoch,baseline correct and so on.A picture of oscillogram from 0 ms to 650 ms was achieved.Finally,SPSS16.0 was applied to analyze the behavior data and brain data.The results show that:In terms of the accuracy,the level of English has a significant impact on English vocabulary recognition;in terms of response time,there is a significant difference in different mother tongues and English proficiency.Further research found that(1)for Han-Chinese students,the students with lower English proficiency are mainly affected by orthography;while the students with higher English proficiency are most affected by the phonology.(2)for Korean-Chinese students,both the higher and lower English proficiency students are most affected by the orthography.The following conclusions can be drawn:(1)Han-Chinese students are affected by both Chinese and English processing modes,and orthography is the main way to word access.The higher English proficiency is,the greater influence of the English processing model becomes.Therefore,the phonological effect becomes the main way of word access.The results of this study support the Dual-route Hypothesis.(2)for Korean-Chinese students,both the higher and lower English proficiency students are most affected by the orthography.Because both English and Korean are the phonograms and the form and pronunciation are closely related,for Korean-Chinese students,the orthographic and phonological effects are the main ways to word access.The research results support the Dual-route Hypothesis.