The Influence Of Second Language Proficiency And Semantic Relatedness On Semantic Priming Effects

Semantic priming, also called semantic related lexical priming, refers to a tendency for language users to facilitate in the product and comprehension of their processing similar lexicons. It can be divided into three categories, including associative priming, category priming and mediated priming. In 1970s, the concept of semantic priming was first proposed by Meyer& Schvaneveldt (1971). They claimed that semantic relatedness has a profound impact on the processing and storing of language in human mind. In terms of priming effect, however, it refers to a kind of facilitation of response time for prime stimuli to target stimuli. For example, in the lexical decision task, it will facilitate response for "pencil" as a target stimulus when "pen" is considered as a prime stimulus, but "tomato’"’as a prime stimulus cannot facilitate the response for "pen".When it comes to representative mechanisms of semantic priming research, there are several sorts as following. Firstly, with the development of cognitive psychology from symbolic connectionism to neural connectionism, the research of semantic priming mechanisms mainly pay attention to spreading activation model, compound-cued theories and interactive activation model. With the development of representative mechanisms of semantic priming research, another mechanism of semantic priming called distributed memory model or distributed connectionist model has been proposed. These four mechanisms have their own emphases for interpreting semantic priming. But comparing with them, to some extent, distributed memory model gives a stronger explanation for semantic priming.In the past several years, researchers increasingly focused on the factors influencing semantic priming effects, these research referred to semantic relatedness (Meyer & Schvaneveldt,1971) and word frequency (Grainger & Segui,1990), cultural script (Lu Zhi,2003) as well as age (Friedrich & Friederici, 2005) and SOA (Shelton & Martin,1992).Previous studies on factors influencing semantic priming effects have made great progress, but there are still some inadequacies.1) Although many studies analyzed various factors that affect semantic priming effects, they did not fully explore the importance of second language proficiency levels and semantic type for semantic priming effects.2) Many studies involved effects of second language proficiency and semantic relatedness, but they did not explore interaction among second language proficiency and synonymy, antonymy and the interaction among second language proficiency and hyponymy, basic words those factors in details. On the basis of distributed memory theory, the present study probes into effects of these factors:synonym, antonymy, hyponymy, basic words as well as second language proficiency for EFL learners on semantic priming effects. Three major research questions are:1) What are the differences of correct frequency and reaction time between lexical decision task and semantic categorization task? 2) Whether second language proficiency and semantic relatedness have influences on semantic priming effects or not in two tasks? 3) What are the different semantic priming effects between antonymy and synonymy, basic words and hyponymy, respectively?The results of the present study showed that:1) In terms of correct frequency and reaction time, high-level L2 learners were superior to low-level L2 learners; there was no interaction among second language proficiency, semantic relatedness or semantic type and type of task.2) In lexical decision task, semantic priming effects for different second language proficiency learners were influenced by semantic relatedness and semantic type, while in semantic categorization task, semantic priming effects for different second language proficiency learners were not influenced. 3) In lexical decision task, there was no significant difference between synonymy pairs and antonymy ones. Therefore, both of them were no different influence on semantic priming effects; in semantic categorization task, from the second result, semantic type did not have an influence on semantic priming effects, therefore, the degree of semantic priming effects between basic words and hyponymy pairs could not be compared. However, according to the data, in semantic categorization task, the reaction time and correct frequency of the subjects were much more rapid and accurate in basic words than hyponymy pairs.