[01] Tao Zeng, College of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China. [02] Xiaoya Li, College of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China. [03] Biyun Deng, College of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China. [04] Taoyan Zhu, College of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China. [05] Rui Zhu, College of Foreign Languages, Hunan University, Changsha, China.

Factors that influence semantic priming effects have captured the attention of many scholars. Previous studies on factors influencing semantic priming effects have made great progress, but there are still some inadequacies. Although it is commonly agreed that semantic priming occurs in semantic-related word pairs, the influence of different lexical semantic relationship types has rarely been investigated. The present study tried to investigate the difference of semantic priming effect between Chinese learners’ native and second language, as well as the influence of lexical relationships on semantic priming. Two experiments were carried out by adopting a lexical decision task. Results showed that: 1) The magnitude of semantic priming was not consistent between the native language and the second language by the variables of error rate and reaction time. 2) Generally, synonyms and antonyms have a significant influence on semantic priming effect in the two languages, but there was no significant difference between the two types of relationship. Hyponym exerted different influence on semantic priming effect between native and second languages. In the native language, the hyponym pairs had the largest impact on semantic priming, while in the second language, the semantic relationship of hyponym did not have any impact on semantic priming.

Semantic Relatedness, Semantic Type, Semantic Priming Effects

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