An Experimental Research On Japanese Lexical Access Of Chinese Students

Lexical access is the coding process which selects the best matched enry among many enries in the mental lexicon based on the input information. The lexical access of a second language has been a hot research topic in recent years. This study investigated the Chinese-Japanese bilingual participants on how Chinese impact on the processing of Japanese words, and the access model of phonology and semantics. This research used behaviorial experiments and event-related potentials (ERP) to study the lexical access process. The main measures of word processing by ERP are the positive/negative P200/N200 wave which was observed around 200 ms and the negative N400 wave which was observed around 400 ms. It is generally believed that the P200/N200 is related to morphological processing in visual words, and the N400 is sensitive to semantic processing.We make following conclusions the results of our experiments:1. When Chinese-Japanese bilinguals were processing the Chinese characters in Japanese, the phonology and semantics of Chinese were automatically activated and impacted the phonological and semantic access of Japanese;2. The morphological structure impacted the phonological lexical access, and the different morphological structures had different models of phonological lexical access;3. There was no need for phonological mediation during the semantic access of morphologically consistent words;4. The morphological structures impacted the semantic access, different morphological structures had different models of semantic access;5. The Japanese lexical access model of Chinese-Japanese bilinguals depends on the morphological structure of input word..