A Study on Bound Stem Recognition Processing by Chinese English Learners
Stems of English derived words can be classified into free stems and bound stems.A free stem can be a word in its own right,while bound stems cannot.From a linguistic perspective,bound stems are semantically empty but grammatically full when compared with free stems.Despite different linguistic features of free and bound stems,many studies have indicated that bound stems,due to their large family size,are processed much alike as free stems by native English speakers in word recognition.Fe-wer studies have been done concerning bound stem processing by L2 learners.Experiment 1 was designed to test whether Chinese English learners(CELs)have morphological awareness with regard to bound stems since a bound stem looks like a pseudoword.A lexical decision task was adopted to see whether CELs process bound stems(e.g.clude)and nonwords constructed by chan-ging one letter(e.g.blud)in a different way.Results of Experiment 1 showed that like English native speakers,CELs responded more accurately to nonwords than to bound stems.Experiment 2 was carried out to investigate the processing differences between bound stems and free stems.Whether a word containing a bound stem(e.g.CONCLUDE)is facilitated by a nonword containing the same bound stem(e.g.breclude)was investigated,compared with an unrelated nonword prime(e.g.breffer).A free stem condition was also included(e.g.relegal-ILLEGAL)to compare with bound stem condition.Results of Experiment 2 revealed that CELs showed priming effects in both conditions as English native speakers did.Results of both experiments suggested that like native English speakers,L2 learners have bound stem representations and bound stem and free stem processing appear to be simi-lar.
Chinese English learnersmorphological awarenessbound stemsfree stemsa lexical decision taskword recognition processing
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
