Testing Conceptual Routes in Elementary/Highly Proficient Persian Speaking EFL Learners

According to a basic prediction made by the revised hierarchical model (RHM,Kroll & Stewart, 1994), there is no L2 conceptual connection at the beginningstages of language learning as L2 learners mostly rely on L1 conceptual connectionsto retrieve the meaning of the L2 words.With increasing proficiency, however, therewould be a direct access from L2 to the conceptual system. Available literaturechallenges this hypothesis, as it shows the existence of the L2 conceptualconnections from early stages of L2 acquisition (Duyck&Brysbaert, 2004). Thereis one study which supports this hypothesis; however, it is problematic in thesense that it used a long prime exposure duration (Basnight-Brown &Altarriba,2007).In an attempt to reevaluate the prediction of this model, two groups of highlyproficient and two groups of elementaryPersian learners of English were testedon noncognate stimuli with lexical decision task in both forward and backwarddirection. The results obtained for elementary L2 learners were consistent withRHM. The data showed the presence of strong L1 conceptual connections and theabsence of L2 conceptual connections at this level of proficiency. However, thepattern obtained for highly proficient L2 learners could not be interpretedin termsof the model.

کلیدواژه ها:

Episodic task ، language priming ، RHM