Japanese EFL learners' access to English homographic words: A psycholinguistic study using priming experiments

Abstract

This study investigates how Japanese EFL learners access English homographic words. Participants were asked to complete two experimental priming tasks (a lexical decision task and semantic relevance judgment task) using PC software. The lexical decision task assessed how semantically associated words as prime words affected the participants' lexical decisions on target homographs, based on their reaction times and accuracy rate. The semantic relevance judgment task evaluated how the participants judged the relations between the target homographs and the semantically associated words as prime words based on their judgment scores and reaction times. The results revealed no priming effects of the semantically associated words in the lexical decision task. On the other hand, there were significant priming effects in the semantic relevance judgment task. Overall, the results of the two tasks revealed that Japanese EFL learners are likely to access a single meaning of homographs more strongly in the cognitive process. In addition, the configurations of lexical access can differ between the lexical decision task and semantic relevance judgment task.