A Psychological Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Recognition of English Words Written in Capital and Small Letters

Abstract

Words are the fundamental elements in language. Word recognition plays a key role in English lexical learning, which is one of the primary focuses of studies and researches in linguistics. As far as the grapheme is concerned, Chinese has no capital characters and small characters; however, English letters do have. The present paper aims at digging out the internal factors which give rise to identification differences between English words written in capital letters and English words written in small letters from psychological point of view, and the present researcher proposes a couple of helpful implications for both Chinese EFL teachers and EFL learners in order to minimize the magnitude of the “shocks†for Chinese EFL learners.