An experiment study of Japanese learners of Chinese of their lexical access

This paper examines orthography similarity effect in two groups of Japanese learners of Chinese. The purpose of the research was to investigate how words was accessed and stored in two mental lexicons. With a data of two-character words whose orthography are similar or dissimilar in both Chinese and Japanese, two experiments were used to investigate phonological and semantic processing in the word level. The results suggest that the depth of individual word knowledge affect the patterns of lexical representation and the learners change their way of accessing and storing language information with the development of their language proficiency.