The Factors Modulating L2 Lexical Familiarity

Over the past few decades,the influence on familiarity has always been a hot topic in the field of linguistics.The perception of familiarity plays an important role in human behavior.As a crucial psycholinguistic variable,word familiarity has an important influence on word recognition and sentence comprehension,especially on accessing the second language lexical meaning and understanding the idioms with metaphor.Meanwhile,word frequency,word classes and concreteness are all found to be related to the word familiarity.In addition,when researchers pay their attention to the studies of emotion,they find that emotional properties of words also influence the perception of word familiarity in terms of valence,arousal and dominance.Therefore,this study aims to discuss the modulation of emotional properties,word frequency,word classes and concreteness on the familiarity of L2 lexicon.Specifically,four research questions will be discussed in this study:(1)Will the familiarity of L2 lexicon be affected by their emotional properties in terms of valence,arousal and dominance?(2)Will the familiarity of L2 lexicon be correlated with the frequency of L2 Lexicon?(3)Will the familiarity of L2 lexicon differ in terms of word classes?(4)Will the familiarity of L2 lexicon be modulated by their concreteness?Based on the research questions proposed above,this study was conducted among a total of 1,595 undergraduates of non-English majors by a paper-and-pencil test.The words which should be rated in this study were all selected from the syllabus of CET-4and CET-6.The data were then analyzed by SPSS.The results showed that the familiarity of L2 lexicon was modulated by emotional properties,word frequency,word classes and concreteness.To be specific,from the perspective of emotional properties,the more positive,more arousing and more dominant the words were perceived to be,the more familiar they were.As for the frequency of L2 lexicon,more frequent words were perceived to be more familiar than less frequent words.With respect to word classes,nouns played the most powerful role in determining the familiarity of L2 lexicon.The next word classes were verbs and adjectives(they had no difference),adverbs and function words.In terms of concreteness,concrete words were more familiar than abstract words.