The Influence Of Semantic Relationship On Semantic Priming Effects

Semantic priming refers to the facilitation of processing of related words in the comprehension and production.The phenomenon was first discovered by Meyer&Schvaneveldt(1971).Since then,numerous theories and models about the mechanisms of semantic priming had been proposed.Some of the most famous ones were Spreading Activation Model,Compound-cue Theories and Distributed Memory Model.Factors that influence semantic priming effects have captured the attention of many scholars.The factors included semantic types(Moss et al.1995),word frequency(Grainger&Segui,1990),as well as age(Friedrich&Friederici,2005)and stimulus onset asynchrony also called SOA(Shelton&Martin,1992).Previous studies on factors influencing semantic priming effects made great progress,but there were still some inadequacies.Although it was commonly agreed that semantic priming occurred in semantic-related word pairs,the influence of different lexical semantic relationship types had rarely been investigated.The present study tries to investigate the problem.Three major research questions are presented.1)Whether the semantic priming effect for the three types of lexical relationship will arise in Chinese learners' native and second language?2)What's the difference of semantic priming effect between Chinese learners' native and second language?3)How do the lexical relationships influence semantic priming?The questions were investigated by applying the lexical decision task in two experiments.The results of the present study showed that:1)Semantic priming effect did occur in native Chinese and second language English,which was uniform to the previous studies.2)The magnitude of semantic priming was not consistent between the native language and the second language by the variables of error rate and reaction time.3)Generally,synonyms and antonyms have a significant influence on semantic priming effect in the two languages,but there was no significant difference between the two types of relationship.Hyponym exerted different influence on semantic priming effect between native and second languages.In the native language,the hyponym pairs had the largest impact on semantic priming.While in the second language,the semantic relationship of hyponym did not have any impact on semantic priming.