Accessing Lexicon Versus Time Pressure: Testing Non-native Speakers of English to Perform in English Language

Abstract

Storing words in memory is an interesting topic for a great number of researchers working in the fields of linguistics, applied linguistics and psycholinguistics around the globe. It is worth mentioning that the words we know are stored in a very complex way in our memory this can be pictured as the World Wide Web. Researchers have always been curious about the way this store is accessed, which in psycholinguistics is known as mental lexicon. This paper aims to explore how this network-like-store is accessed when a person is under pressure. In this study, twenty-four participants are tested in two runs of the experiment, which is used to conduct the study. On the first attempt, participants are placed in a typical scenario where there is no time constraint or any pressure to produce a certain number of words within a given amount of time. Later, they will be asked to write again in a shorter period of time and then the time is further decreased to produce written words in the third run. The effects of time constraints on the capacity to use the mental lexicon during written language production will be examined in this study. At the conclusion of the paper, the improvement of accessing mental lexicon is shown when the time pressure is increased.