A Developmental Pattern Of Word Meaning Access In Chinese EFL Learners

For English learning under formal settings in China,vocabulary learning is always regarded as one of the core components in learning English as a foreign language.Most Chinese students start to learn English since their primary school and are then required to learn novel words continuously by memorizing their word forms,meanings and other linguistic properties during their school time.How do learners integrate new words in their target language in memory and what is the route for them to get access to corresponding concepts from words? These questions have attracted much attention from researchers in bilingualism in the past three decades.An answer to these questions has been given by the Revised Hierarchical Model(RHM)(Kroll & Stewart,1994)which has exerted tremendous influences in the field of bilingual research.Since it has been proposed,abundant empirical studies have been conducted and both positive and negative evidences were provided.In order to investigate the developmental pattern of word meaning access of Chinese EFL learners based on the theories of the RHM,we recruited three groups of Chinese students varied in their English proficiency to perform an English-Chinese translation recognition task.Using the Mixed-effects Linear Modeling to fit the data,some important results emerged.The results indicated that all the participants regardless of their English proficiency were affected by the form similarity while only the two groups with relatively higher levels of proficiency were affected by the semantic relatedness.Chinese EFL learners at their initial stage can only rely on the lexical links to access L2 word meaning.Their lexical access cannot be conceptually mediated.With the increase of their English proficiency,the direct conceptual route is strengthened and conceptual mediation is made possible.But the lexical links are always the very important route in Chinese EFL learners' access to L2 word meaning.They will never disappear.