The Activation Process And Representation In Visual English Word Recognition: Evidence From Chinese-English Bilinguals

The English identify as second language in visual word is argued to explore how Chinese-English bilingual reading in English response to the translation equivalents of target words, morphologically related to targets, phonologically related to targets, semantic association of targets. The research is expected to find out which feature of a word plays an important role and is activated in the process of semantic access.The study consists of two experiments, one is lexical decision task, and the other is the semantic decision task. According to the different SOA, each experiment is divided into two sub-experiments: experiment A and experiment B. A test of the SOA is short (57ms), B experiment SOA was long (145ms). The results are as follows:In experiment 1A, when shorter SOA 57ms, there only found a the translation priming effect; in the experiment 1B, when longer SOA(145ms), there found the translation priming effect and semantic priming effect in the high familiarity word, and the translation priming effect was significantly greater than semantic priming effect.In the experiment 2A, the translation priming effect was presented; experiment 2B, there found the translation priming effect in the high familiarity word level, There are translation, orthographic, phonological and semantic priming effects in low familiarity level, the translation effect was significantly greater than orthographic, phonological and semantic priming effects.It is not a necessary condition for that access to the meaning of L2 item in visual word recognition through phonological mediation; the translation priming is earlier than other priming in the relative time course of activation.There seemed to good evidence that two languages system was stored in single share conceptual level, linked between L1 item and L2 item at lexical level. The Chinese-English subject wants to access the meaning of L2 item rely on activate the corresponding L1 word, which will then be used to activate the common concept storage. Subject operates the L2 largely through L1 mediation.