The Effect Of Subjective Surface Frequency On English Past Tense Processing In Chinese EFL Learners

The investigation into how complex words are represented and processed has been an active research topic in mental lexicon study in recent decades.As an important inflection,the past tense of verbs and its processing have drawn extensive attention.In addition,frequency is a crucial factor that affects word processing.So there is no doubt that the study on either English past tense or word frequency can reveal the mechanism of acquisition,organization and processing of complex words in English learners,especially those whose two languages are distant in typology.The current study aimed to investigate the influence of subjective surface frequency on the processing of English past tense via a masked priming experiment.The present study was a 2(subjective surface frequency: high / low)× 3(priming condition: Identity / Test / Unrelated)within-subject design.The participants were 43 postgraduates majoring in English and were asked to execute the lexical decision task.E-prime 2.0 was used to present stimuli as well as record participants’ response time and accuracy data.Repeated measures ANOVA was then conducted on SPSS 25.0.The results were as follows:1.A main effect of subjective surface frequency was detected.Verbs of high frequency were processed significantly more rapidly and correctly than low-frequency verbs.2.A main effect of priming condition was observed,indicating that different prime words can make a difference to participants’ recognition of target stems.Further analysis showed partial priming effect for high-frequency past-tense verbs and full priming effect for low-frequency forms,which was an indication of full-form processing for high-and rule-based decomposition for low-frequency regularly inflected forms.3.An interaction between subjective surface frequency and priming conditions was observed.The accuracy data showed surface frequency effect only in Test and Unrelated conditions.In terms of response time,the effect of surface frequency was significant in all three priming conditions.To sum up,both priming conditions and subjective surface frequency play a significant role in past tense processing.The above results that participants decomposed low-frequency past tense and accessed high-frequency verbs as a whole fits the weak version of dual-system theories.Moreover,this study proves that the mechanism underlying regular past tense processing in advanced Chinese EFL learners is similar to that in native English speakers.