Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this research, English and Korean students were divided into 2 groups to find out how one’s semantic structure ofnative tongue affects the performance of learning Chinese classifier. The experiment was designed to present participantsthe word pairings consisted of sortal/mensural classifiers and Chinese/English/Korean nouns as the priming stimuli. Theparticipants were asked to decide if the nouns and the classifier are correctly paired for common use. The results showedthat only English speakers judgment of the correct rate for sortal classifiers is higher than the mensural classifiers pairs.However, both Korean and English students have longer response time for the mensural classifiers. In addition, the primingeffect of nouns appeared in affecting participants performance for judging the correctness of pairing in native Chinesespeakers and the English/Korean learners. The findings indicated that a cross-language semantic activation occurreddespite the competition processing between L1/L2 while learning Chinese classifiers.