The Cognitive Ease of Processing Semantically Related Words in Second Language Education

The current study presents an alternative approach toward semantic relatedness research in second/foreign language (L۲) education as it looks at the issue from a cognitive perspective. The participants were ۳۵ intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A semantic priming experiment was used to examine the cognitive processing of semantically related and semantically unrelated words. Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time and error rate data to establish any potential interaction between the primes and targets with reference to their semantic relatedness. The results showed that semantic relatedness does exercise a noteworthy influence on the ease of cognitive processing of L۲ words. This facilitative effect is reflected in faster responses and lower errors on the part of the EFL learners when they dealt with semantically related words in comparison to semantically unrelated words, and can be attributed to the core mechanism of activation of lexical items in the human mind.

Keywords:

cognitive processing , facilitative effect , Semantic Relatedness , semantic priming experiment