A Corpus-Based Study on the Classification and Processing Mechanism of English-Chinese One-To-Many Translation-Equivalent Word Pairs

To study the correspondence relation between one English word and its Chinese equivalent words as well as their processing mechanism in bilinguals’ mental lexicons, we make a corpus-based calculation to acquire frequencies of some English-Chinese one-to-many translation-equivalent word pairs (i.e., the respective usage frequency of multiple Chinese words corresponding to an English word), according to which we introduce a classification criterion to divide these word pairs into two groups with the lower and higher maximum values of corresponding frequency. To verify whether this criterion reflects the activation in the actual processing, a semantic consistency decision task under the priming paradigm is carried out. Its results demonstrate that the actual activation of the English-Chinese translation-equivalent word pairs can be predicted by their corresponding frequencies obtained from statistics drawn based on a corpus. Additionally, the research further indicates that current English-Chinese dictionaries are far from sufficient coverage of all the translation-equivalent word pairs, and excluding a large number of words in the actual use of language.