A Study Of The Frequency Effects On The Second Language Recognition Memory Of Words And Phrases

The effects of word frequency on language using and acquisition have been a hot topic in language study.Some research results have proved that word frequency plays an important role in reading comprehension,language acquisition,and information extraction.High-frequency words always show advantages in language processing in the past research.While in the study of recognition memory in first language(L1),frequency effects present mirror effect,which means low-frequency words own more advantages and can be identified more easily than high-frequency words.The study here aims to investigate whether word frequency and phrase frequency affect the processing of words or phrases in second language(L2)recognition memory.This study uses the psychological experiment software DMDX as an experiment tool,and chooses experiment materials from the Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA)and the Chinese Learner English Corpus(CLEC).The 150 postgraduates of Lanzhou University take part in the study as participants.Besides,by comparison and contrast of the results between words and phrases in recognition memory,this study tries to explain some issues about compositionality.According to the research objectives,the author proposes the following research questions.(1)Does word frequency affect the processing of words in L2 recognition memory? If it does,what are the differences between the high-frequency category and the low-frequency category? Does the effect show mirror effect?(2)Does phrase frequency affect the processing of phrases in L2 recognition memory? If it does,what are the differences between the high-frequency category and the low-frequency category? Does the effect show mirror effect?(3)Are the results of Question 1 and Question 2 similar or different? Do words and phrases show similar or different results in the processing of recognition memory? The study designs three experiments to test and answer the above questions.Based on the research questions,the author also puts forward the relevant hypotheses for this study.On the basis of the results and analyses of the three experiments,this study finds that word frequency in recognition memory shows mirror effect,which supports some scholars’ relevant research results.In the experiments,low-frequency words attract more hits and fewer false alarms than those of high-frequency words,which means lowfrequency words can be identified more easily in recognition memory.In the experiments,however,phrase frequency does not show the same results as the word frequency does.That is to say that phrase frequency does not present mirror effect.The differences between word frequency effect and phrase frequency effect provide evidence to discuss the issue of compositionality.This also denies the view that phrases share the same retrieval model with words in memory.Thus,mirror effect is not the necessary manifestation in recognition memory.And phrases are not processed holistically in recognition memory as words,because they are compositional.Finally,the results show that word frequency and phrase frequency present no significant influence on response time in recognition memory.Based on the above-mentioned analyses,the author gives further discussion about the response time,and gives some possible explanations and interpretations of the results.