The Effects Of Lexical Neighborhood On The Chinese English Learners’ Lexical Access

This study aims to assess the effects of lexical neighborhood on the lexical access of Chinese second language learners. The influential effects, lexical neighborhoods, are discussed in three aspects:neighborhood density, phonological vs. orthographic neighborhood density, and neighborhood frequency.In the English acquisition, second language learners always encounter similar English words, which have already deserved much attention from the foreign scholars. In the past years, among the native English speakers, it is presumed that (1)words from low neighborhood density are more easily recognized than words from high neighborhood density;(2) phonological neighborhoods hurt whereas orthographic neighborhoods help spoken word recognition, while orthographic neighborhoods inhibit whereas phonological neighborhoods help facilitate written word recognition;(3) words with several higher-frequency neighborhoods are responded to more slowly and less accurately than words with several lower-frequency neighborhoods.However, these hypotheses are just verified among native English speakers, but not among second language learners. Therefore, the two influential aspects are to be tested in this study among second language learners, besides which, the interrelationship between words with phonological and orthographic neighborhood is also discussed.The research subjects of this essay are thirty3rd-year English majors from a university in Jiangsu Province. They participated in the vocabulary test through computer software. Qualitative analysis compared the difference of reaction time and error rates. The data analysis yielded the following findings:(1) With regard to the neighborhood density, although these subjects spend more time in recognizing the words from high neighborhood density than those from low neighborhood density, there is not any obvious difference between these two variables;(2) As for the phonological and orthographic neighborhoods, subjects respond more quickly to words with fewer phonological neighborhoods than those with more phonological neighorhoods, while the results of words differing in orthographic neighborhoods reveal totally different patterns as those observed in the reaction time data of words with phonological neighborhoods;(3) In terms of the neighborhood frequency, words with several higher-frequency neighborhoods are responded to more slowly and less accurately than words with several lower-frequency neighborhoods.Despite there is not any obvious difference in most of our research results, there are still some pedagogical implications to some extent:it is better for learners to avoid similar words when revising those already acquired words.