A Study On Chinese EFL High School Learners' Processing Of Morphologically Complex Words

The investigation of the mechanisms underlying morphological processing has been a hot debate in psycholinguistic research for several decades.More and more researchers have turned their attention on exploring how foreign language learners process morphologically complex words.However,previous studies sel dom took into consideration high school learners.Therefore,the current study selected Chinese high school learners as the research subjects and investigated the mechanisms underlying their processing of morphologically complex words.More specifically,the study,employing three masked priming experiments which were designed with the software E-prime 2.0,examined how Chinese EFL high school learners process inflected,derived,and compound words,as well as considered the effects of language proficiency on morphological processing.Each priming experiment was made up of three types of prime-target pairs,namely,the identical pairs where the primes and the targets were identical,the test pairs where the primes and the targets were morphologically related,and the unrelated pairs where the primes and the targets were orthographically and semantically unrelated.Based on the three types of prime-target pairs,three priming conditions were constructed,that is,the identity priming condition,the test primi ng condition,and the unrelated priming condition.In each experiment,the word length,frequency,and familiarity of the targets and primes,working as irrelevant variables,were closely controlled.The subjects' mean reaction times spent in lexical decision task in different priming conditions functioned as the dependent variable,and were submitted to the software SPSS 21 for data analysis.Forty high school learners,being divided into two proficiency levels,were invited to complete all three experiments.The results were as follows:1)In the processing of inflected words,Chinese EFL high school learners processed regular inflections by morphological decomposition.In the processing of derived words,Chinese EFL high school learners were capable to decom pose derived words into constituent morphemes,which,however,was not fully developed.As for compound processing,compound words could also be given to morphological analysis,which,however,was short of efficiency.2)Language proficiency influenced morphological processing.In the processing of inflected words,although all high school learners,regardless of their proficiency,showed the same processing mechanism,high proficient learners were faster than low proficient learners.However,in derivational processing,learners of different proficiency levels presented different processing mechanisms.Learners of high proficiency level were able to parse derived words into constituent morphemes,whereas learners of low proficiency level totally relied on ful l-listing representations to process derived words.In addition,the processing mechanism for compound words was also found to be subjected to language proficiency.High proficient learners could make an inefficient decomposition to compound words,while l ow proficient learners stored compounds as independent entries.In the study,the empirical result of inflectional processing provided evidence to Morphological Decomposition Model,whereas the empirical results of derivational and compound processing showed only a tendency towards morphological decomposition.And language proficiency was proved to influence the way Chinese EFL high school learners process derived and compound words,instead of the processing route for inflected words.Such a pattern of results,we believed,was partly due to the teaching preference in classroom instruction where grammatical rules took the first place and vocabulary instruction,especially the instruction of morphological information,was neglected.And the rote-learning tendency of high school learners also contributed to such a processing pattern,which made them insensitive to morphological structure.However,with the increase of their language proficiency and more exercise,they can gradually improve their sensitivity.