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Abstract Abstract: Research on the processing of compounds-an important component of polymorphemic words-helps to explore how human brains process multiple lexical information. However, such research is very limited and has not examined the influence of L2 proficiency. This study explores how Chinese learners with high/low English proficiencies process English compounds by carrying a repeated lexical decision task. The experiment shows that both high and low groups use a multi-route model to process compounds. But there are also differences between them. For the low group, compound word is activated after the left constituent, but before the right constituent. The right constituent isn’t activated fully. Familiarity effect appears in the left constituent and transparency effect appears in the right constituent. For the high group, the compound transparency effect emerges at the very beginning of processing and strengthens after the recognition of the compound. The right constituent is activated fully. Familiarity effect and transparency effect both appear in the left and right constituents, but transparency effect is weaker than familiarity effect. These findings show that compound word processing differs from complex word processing. L2 proficiency doesn’t affect the route of processing, but affect the time course and the strengths of the activation of compound word and its constituents.
Key words: compounds processing; Chinese-English learners; English proficiency; multi-route model
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