Word-specific And Word-general Knowledge In L2 Chinese Lexical Inference: Examining The Moderation Of Instructional Level

Word knowledge plays a central role in reading outcome.Many researchers have adopted the categorization of breadth knowledge and depth knowledge,but such categorization seems to overlook the evolvement of word knowledge through learning exposure.Furthermore,depth knowledge is broadly defined,and cannot be assessed through one measurement.Therefore,the framework of word-specific and word-general knowledge presuming the uniqueness of word knowledge facets is adopted in this research.The study aims to answer the following questions: 1)What are the individual contributions of word-specific knowledge and word-general knowledge to lexical inference among L2 Chinese learners with different instructional levels?2)Is there a moderation effect of instructional level on L2 Chinese lexical inference processing? 3)Is there a linguistic threshold in L2 Chinese word leaning process? 4)Does Matthew effect exist among L2 Chinese learners with different instructional levels? This study recruits L2 Chinese learners from college-level study-abroad programs in China to explore the effect of word-specific and word-general knowledge on L2 Chinese lexical inference.Instruments employed in this study includes character knowledge task,definitional knowledge task,morpheme recognition task,and morpheme discrimination task.The collected data were analyzed by SPSS with the grouped regression model.The results indicated that: 1)definitional knowledge and morpheme discrimination made significant contributions to lexical inference,whereas character knowledge and morpheme recognition had no significant contributions,whether for elementary-level learners or relatively proficient learners;2)the moderation of instructional level exists in the process of lexical inference,but its contribution is not significant;3)the different roles of word knowledge in L2 Chinese lexical inferencing suggested that there might be a threshold of linguistic knowledge in the usage of L2 word knowledge;4)the different performance in two instructional levels indicated that Matthew effect might exist in word learning process.This study verifies the linguistic mechanism of L2 lexical inferencing,makes unique theoretical contribution to the exploration of language specificity,and also adds new empirical evidence to justify the distinct role of word knowledge in L2 Chinese lexical inference,especially when we take the instructional level into account.In addition,it offers theoretical and pedagogical implications for language learning and future studies.