Preferred Lexical Access Strategy in Persian Learners of English: Associative, Semantic Strength or both?

Background and Aim: Word association has long been a robust means to investigate the organization of the mental lexicon. Words in the lexicon construct semantic fields in which they are linked through one or several nodes with associative and/or semantic connections with a pervasive native speaker preference for the former. Non-native preferences are, however, in need of more inquiry. For instance, previous studies on Iranian EFL learners have revealed an inconsistent pattern of accessing words with different lexical relation types, partly due to the limitations in the methodology and partly because of the vagueness in response categorization. Mostly word association tests (WAT) have been widely used for exploring lexical access strategies; however, they cannot demarcate the degree of lexical strength in different lexical relation types. Methods: To this end, we took advantage of picture naming (PN) paradigm since it has evidenced to truly reflect the association between a concept and other related words in the mental lexicon. The prime-target stimuli chosen had associative, semantic or both types of relations. A group of Persian learners of English (N=۱۱, ۱۳ to ۱۵ years old) at beginner level based on CEFR from an English institute in Shiraz were asked to participate in the naming task of forty-eight pairs of prime-target words selected based on the Keppel-Postman (۱۹۷۰) norms of word association. The primed picture-naming test was designed using Psychopy software. Results: To compensate for the shortcomings in the previous studies, this study investigates the preferred strategy through which Persian learners of English as a foreign language access words in their mental lexicon. Conclusion: The literature suggests that pairs of words with either both associative and semantic connections or purely associative connections are accessed in less time; however a tendency is observed in Persian learners of English towards the former but not the latter since the teaching practices give primacy to sense relation in vocabulary instruction. Hence, teaching lexical items through creating links with real world referents that readily construct associative relationships with previously learnt words would prove beneficial to bilingual learners of English.

کلیدواژه ها:

naming latency ، associative ، semantic ، lexical access