Effects Of Semantic Transparency And Inhibitory Control On Chinese EFL Learners’ Processing Of English Compound Words

Differences in the processing of English compound words with varying levels of semantic transparency have long been demonstrated but with mixed results in both first language(L1)and second language(L2)studies.Also,little attention has been paid to the underlying reasons that attributed to the processing differences.The present study attempted to address this gap by examining whether inhibitory control was recruited during the processing of fully transparent and fully opaque compound words.A total of 67 Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language(EFL)learners were recruited from Beijing Foreign Studies University(BFSU)to conduct the experiment in this study.There were two tasks in this experiment.A modified version of Color-Word Stroop task was designed to measure participants’ inhibitory control capacity and a lexical decision task to examine their compound processing.Linear mixed-effects models were employed to analyze whether participants’ scores in the Color-Word task could predict their performance in the lexical decision task.This study has two main findings.First,data analyses revealed that there was no significant difference between the processing of fully transparent and fully opaque compounds in either accuracy or reaction time(RT)analysis.Second,results showed that,inhibitory control capacity was neither involved in the comprehension of fully transparent compounds nor exerted an influence on the comprehension of fully opaque compound words for L2 learners.These findings suggested that native-like morphological decomposition in compound processing was less possible for advanced Chinese EFL learners,thus leaving little room for semantic transparency or inhibitory control to have an effect.Unlike native speakers,relatively highly proficient Chinese EFL learners may resort to the lexical storage rather than the morphological decomposition during the comprehension of L2 compound words.These findings at least indicated that the whole-word processing route was primarily adopted in early L2 compound visual recognition by advanced Chinese EFL learners.The findings of this study added evidence to the models of L2 compound processing and the representation mechanisms of the bilingual lexicon.