Primary Phonological Planning Units In L2 Lexical Access:A Priming Study

Lexical access involves accessing its abstract phonological contents and assembling them into units of the proper size.Phonological encoding is one of the most important processes in lexical access.Phonological planning unit refers to the measure of the phonological information extracted by the speaker before articulation.The proper selection of phonological planning units will affect verbal fluency.Thus,the phonological preparation in the process of phonological encoding can help the speaker to extract the phonological form of the word for a successful pronunciation.Early researchers mainly studied the primary phonological planning unit of monolingual.In recent years,some researchers shifted their study to the primary phonological planning in L2 lexical access.However,relevant studies were mostly based on those similar-orthography languages（such as English and Dutch）,empirical studies on different script languages（Chinese and English）were relatively rare.In addition,related studies only focused on high proficient bilinguals and rarely paid attention to low proficient bilinguals.Besides,the influences of L2 proficiency on the primary phonological planning units in L2 lexical access were rarely investigated.Chinese-English bilinguals are recruited for this study.The present study is aimed at investigating the primary phonological planning units in L2 lexical access and whether their L2 proficiency will affect the phonological unit in L2 lexical access.To be specific,the current study addresses the following two questions:1.What is the primary phonological planning unit in English lexical access for Chinese-English bilinguals?2.How does their L2 proficiency affect the primary phonological planning unit in L2 lexical access?40 participants were recruited for this study,20 English major graduate students and 20 high school students.This experiment adopted a masked paradigm and priming-naming task to explore their reaction time of naming words under different priming conditions.Based on the results of analysis,firstly,the researcher found that the Onset overlap and CV overlap significantly facilitated the naming of target words.There is no significant difference between Onset overlap priming and CV overlap priming.The results indicated that phoneme segment might be the primary phonological planning unit in their L2 lexical access.Secondly,Onset overlap andCV overlap significantly facilitated the naming of target words for both the high proficient group and the low proficient group,and there was no significant difference of facilitation between the two priming types.To be specific,the L2 proficiency does not affect the primary phonological unit in L2 lexical access.This study supports that segment is the primary phonological planning unit in L2 lexical access for Chinese-English bilingual and provides new evidence for it.The influence of L2 proficiency is investigated,which provides preliminary empirical evidence for further study on the relationship between L2 proficiency and phonological encoding.The current study also provides enlightenment for Chinese students to learn English,especially the learning of pronunciation and the cultivation of their phonological awareness.