On April 17, 2024, Professor Marcus Taft, a specially appointed professor from our base, was invited to deliver an academic presentation to our faculty and students. The topic of the presentation was "A difference in English lexical processing between native speakers and Chinese-English bilinguals." This presentation was part of the series of lectures for the 6th Academic Forum on Language Acquisition, Cognition, and Brain Science held by our base, and it was also the second academic presentation conducted by Professor Taft during his stay at our institution. The presentation was hosted by Dr. Lu Ji, a full-time researcher from our base, with over thirty faculty members and students participating.
Professor Taft's presentation focused on comparing the mental representations and retrieval models of English words between native speakers and non-native speakers. He introduced current research on the cognitive neural mechanisms of English lexical processing for both native and second-language speakers. A series of experimental results from the masked priming paradigm demonstrated that for native speakers, if the prime word is the stem of the target word, it will trigger a priming effect. However, among non-native speakers, this priming effect may not exist or have a smaller impact. This is likely due to native speakers having a stronger awareness of affixes and stems, making the stem an effective path for lexical cognition.
Finally, the faculty members and students had an in-depth discussion with Professor Taft regarding the content of the presentation, and he answered everyone's questions thoroughly. Professor Taft posed for a photo with some of the participating faculty members and students, and everyone expressed that they had benefited greatly from the presentation.
