The Processing Of English Compounds By Chinese English Learners

As compounding is a productive complex word formation process in manylanguages, the universality of compounds enables us to make comparable materialsacross different languages and it will be necessary to make a study of the processingof English compound words by Chinese English learners. However, most ofresearch has focused on the processing compound words by monolingual learners.There have been fewer investigations into how L2learners process compound words.What’s more, the limited researches on L2learners’ compounds processing verify asemantic transparency effect and a robust second constituent effect. While, the firstconstituent effect in English compounds processing by Chinese English learnersremains untouched. Therefore, this study examined that effect and the effect oflexicality of Chinese translated equivalents in the processing English noun-nouncompounds by Chinese English learners with different L2levels.In order to address these effects, A lexical decision task was adopted toinvestigate the processing among Chinese English learners (Chinese is their nativelanguage and English is their second language). In the experiment, the frequency ofthe first constituents and the lexicality of the translated compounds in Chinese weremanipulated. Two groups of participants (high and low English proficiency)respectively made visual lexical decisions on four types of English compound words:HR, LR, HN and LN (H/L-high/low frequency of the first constituent; R/N–translated compounds in Chinese are real-words/non-words).The results showed significant effects of lexicality and L2proficiency in bothRT and CR data, while no significant effect of first constituents’ frequency wasfound. Regarding the processing of compound words and Taking these resultstogether, this study provided some evidence for morphological decomposition as well as cross-language activation in bilingual compound words processing. What’smore, these findings also give guidance on second language acquisition, concerningabout how to make the recognition and memory of new English compound wordseasier.