Abstract：Abstract: Employing “online linear grammaticality judgment tasks” on E-Prime program, this study explored Chinese EFL learners’ mental representations of English and Chinese psych verb phrases. The research was carried out with a focus on the following three aspects: representation pattern, frequency effect, and their interplay. The major findings were: (1) Generally, English and Chinese psych verb phrases were stored and retrieved holistically. To be specific, English psych verb phrases were characterized by kind of mixed representation pattern, while Chinese psych verb phrases were featured by pure holistic representation pattern; (2) Word frequency had a significant effect on Chinese EFL learners’ English psych verb phrases’ representation, but not on their Chinese counterpart; (3) The representations of English and Chinese psych verb phrases were significantly correlated in Chinese EFL learners’ mental lexicon. From the perspective of their interplay, Chinese as native language had relative advantage in storage and retrieval processing. The findings indicate that the representation patterns of English and Chinese psych verb phrases are different and word frequency and language advantage may be the associated influencing factors.
Key words: English and Chinese psych verb phrases; representation pattern; frequency effect; interplay
