A Study On The Differences Of The Priming Effects In Chinese EFL Learners' Processing Of Chinese And English Hand Verbs

According to embodied cognition theory,concepts are formed through the interaction of brain,body and world experience.The embodied cognition linguistic view regards vocabulary as the result of categorization of external things,the real structure reflected in language,and the product of mind operation.Knowledge acquired through perception,sensory movement or physical experience is an important part of the meaning of the word.Therefore,the meaning acquired by cognitive processing of vocabulary is closely related to the body structure and experience of humans.The hand verbs are closely related to the sensory-perceptual system in language comprehension,but there are few studies on the differences of priming effects on Chinese and English hand verb processing from the perspective of embodied cognition.Therefore,this study intends to explore the differences of the priming effects under different priming conditions on Chinese and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of embodied cognition theory.The specific research questions are listed as follows:?1?Under the non-priming condition,what are the differences of Chinese and English hand verb processing??2?Under the word-priming condition,are there priming effects on Chinese and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners?If there are,what are the differences of the priming effects??3?Under the symbol-priming condition,are there priming effects on Chinese and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners?If there are,what are the differences of the priming effects??4?Under the picture-priming condition,are there priming effects on Chinese and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners?If there are,what are the differences of the priming effects?This study includes Chinese experiments and English experiments,and the 4?priming conditions:non-priming condition,word-priming condition,symbol-priming condition and picture-priming condition?×2?word types:hand verb and abstract verb?experimental design are adopted both in Chinese and English experiments.Sixty English postgraduates from Sichuan International Studies University were selected as subjects.Thirty of them are asked to conduct Chinese experiments and the rest thirty are asked to conduct English experiments.The experimental materials consist of hand verbs,abstract words and their corresponding pseudo-words.The experimental tasks are all lexical decision tasks.Both the Chinese and English experiments consist of two parts.In the first part,the subjects are only required to perform lexical decision on the target words.In the second part,the Chinese character“?”?in Chinese experiments?/the English word“hand”?in English experiments?,the symbol“*”,and the picture of a hand are randomly displayed on the screen.Then,the subjects are presented with the target words and required to perform lexical decision on the target words.The data of accuracy rate and reaction time of the subjects are recorded when they conduct lexical decision tasks.The two experiments were programmed by E-prime 2.0,and then conducted in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning at Sichuan International Studies University.The experimental data were statistically analyzed by SPSS16.0 with the repeated measures ANOVA and the paired sample t-test.The experimental results are listed as follows:?1?Under the non-priming condition,there exists no significant difference between these hand verbs processing and these abstract verbs processing both in Chinese and English condition by Chinese EFL learners.It can be concluded that the Chinese hand verb processing is not significantly different from the Chinese abstract verb processing on this condition through the comparison of reaction time?t=-0.2,p=.984>.05?,and meanwhile the English hand verb processing also has no significant difference from English abstract verb processing on the same condition?t=-0.2,p=.984>.05?.?2?Under the word-priming condition,the Chinese hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is significantly different from that under the non-priming condition?t=4.952,p=.000<.05?.The priming value is 83.62(M_NP-M_WP=83.52).Under this priming condition,the English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is also significantly different from that under the non-priming condition?t=6.025,p=.000<.05?.The priming value is 81.09(M_NP-M_WP=81.09).Therefore,under the word-priming condition,there is stimulating priming effect on both Chinese hand verb processing and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners,and the priming effect on Chinese hand verb processing is slightly stronger than that on English hand verb processing.?3?Under the symbol-priming condition,the Chinese hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is significantly different from that under the non-priming condition?t=3.089,p=.004<.05?.The priming value is 48.97(M_NP-M_SP=48.97).Under this priming condition,the English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is also significantly different from that under the non-priming condition?t=3.523,p=.001<.05?.The priming value is 52.03(M_NP-M_SP=52.03).Therefore,under the symbol-priming condition,there are also stimulating priming effect on both Chinese hand verb processing and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners,but the priming effect on Chinese hand verb processing is less than that on English hand verb processing.?4?Under the picture-priming,the Chinese hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is significantly different from that under the non-priming condition?t=3.984,p=.000<.05?.The priming value is 58.09(M_NP-M_PP=58.09).Under this priming condition,the English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners is significantly different from that under the non-priming condition as well?t=3.313,p=.002<.05?.The priming value is 49.93(M_NP-M_PP=49.93).Therefore,under the picture-priming condition,there is also stimulating priming effect on both Chinese hand verb processing and English hand verb processing by Chinese EFL learners,and the priming effect on Chinese hand verb processing is slightly stronger than that on English hand verb processing.The experimental results indicate that there are differences in the Chinese and English hand verb processing under different priming conditions.In addition,the semantic embodiment has been reflected to a large extent in both Chinese hand verb processing and English hand verb processing.