The High School Students’ Errors in English NP Production from Psycho-Linguistics View

The present paper was an attempt to study the effect of the Persian lexicon on the students’ English NP production in speech production levels. The data were collected from the senior high school students' English speech. The research method is descriptive-analytic. At first 210 errors were classified into 6 groups and then they were analyzed according to principles and hypotheses offered in speech production stages. Persian grammatical features in the students’ utterances show that Persian lexemes have been selected in speech production stages because grammatical processing is the direct consequence of lexical selection. It was found that the activation coming from the conceptual level has been spread to the phonological segments of Persian lexemes according to phonological activation models. So Persian lexicon has been active in forming the surface structure of the students’ utterances. English lexemes associated with corresponding Persian ones in surface structure have been selected from the English lexicon before utterance articulation. The study results are in line with the word association model which assumes L2 words are associated with L1 words and through L1 mediation can L2 words gain access to concepts at early L2 learning.