A Study Of The Effects Of Chinese Lexicalization On English Lexical Inferencing Procedures

Lexical inferencing has received great concern from scholars home and abroad for itsimportance to lexical development and discourse comprehension. Substantial research on thecross-linguistic issues in L2lexical inferencing process has been carried out and yieldedsignificant results. However, concerning the study exploring the effects of L1lexicalization onthe cross-linguistic lexical inferencing process is scarce. Moreover, the previous studies usuallyfocused on the cross-linguistic lexical inferencing between alphabetic languages belonging tothe same Indo-European language family. The study concerning the cross-linguistic lexicalinferencing process between typologically distant languages, including languages such asChinese (hieroglyphic writing) and English (phonetic writing) is very scarce, and there is onlyone such research at present. Therefore, to investigate the effects of Chinese lexicalization onEnglish lexical inferencing procedures, the retrospection and reaction time method was hereindeployed while the two English discourses rendered as stimulus materials included bothChinese lexicalized and non-lexicalized English target words. To be specific, this study wasdesigned to explore five questions:1) What are the patterns of knowledge sources used byparticipants in the process of inferring Chinese lexicalized and non-lexicalized English targetwords?2) Are there any differences between participants’ successful inferencing of Chineselexicalized and non-lexicalized English target words?3) Are there any differences betweenparticipants’ lexical knowledge development of Chinese lexicalized and non-lexicalized Englishtarget words after the inferencing tasks?4) How does Chinese lexicalization influence the timecourse of English lexical inferencing?5) How does participants’ receptive vocabularyknowledge relate to the inferencing success and the reaction times of Chinese lexicalized andnon-lexicalized English target words?To answer the above questions, two independent and complementary on-line experimentsare designed. Participants of the experiment are English major postgraduates studying at NingboUniversity. The data of the study comes from the data of think-aloud and reaction timeexperiments. The results of the experiments are as follows:(1) Participants drew on the samekinds of knowledge sources when they were inferring Chinese lexicalized and non-lexicalizedEnglish target words, but the relative frequencies of use of these sources were different.(2) Success of lexical inferencing in Chinese lexicalized English target words was much higherthan that in Chinese non-lexicalized English target words.(3) Lexical knowledge developmentin Chinese non-lexicalized English target words was larger than that in Chinese lexicalizedEnglish target words after the inferencing tasks.(4) Chinese lexicalization influenced the timecourse of English lexical inferencing. The time spent in inferring the meanings of Chineselexicalized English target words was much shorter than that in Chinese non-lexicalized Englishtarget words.(5) There was a significant relationship between participants’ receptive vocabularyknowledge and their inferencing success for Chinese lexicalized English target words. However,there was no significant relationship between their receptive vocabulary knowledge and theinferencing success for Chinese non-lexicalized English target words and the reaction times forboth Chinese lexicalized and non-lexicalized English target words.The results of the study are expected to contribute to the cross-linguistic lexicalinferencing studies and vocabulary and reading teaching. Theoretically, the present studyreveals the nature of the process of cross-linguistic lexical inferencing between typologicallydistant languages, and thus, further enriches the research in cross-linguistic lexical inferencingand contributes to the construction of cross-linguistic lexical inferencing processing model.Pedagogically, the results of the experiment will provide facilitation to L2vocabulary teachingand L1vocabulary teaching in teaching mother tongue to foreigners and reading teaching.