The Processing and Representation of the Bilingual Chinese-English Mental Lexicon

Cover
King's College London, 2014 - 536 Seiten
This study investigated the representation and processing of the bilingual Chinese- English mental lexicon. Specifically, the conceptual level of representation was examined. Four aims were pursued in this project. First and second, this investigation addressed the way in which concepts are represented and processed in bilingual lexical memory. It also compared language processing on a word level in visual and auditory modalities. Finally, the investigation probed the degree of semantic overlap in bilingual speakers. To achieve the aims of this project, Chinese-English speakers were requested to perform a primed animacy decision task. This task allowed for the addressing of the notions of priming effect, priming asymmetry effect, and the impact of modality on language processing. In addition, bilingual participants and control groups of monolingual English and Chinese participants were requested to take part in a semantic judgment task. This task was used to evaluate the notion of semantic overlap. The ' investigation of the four separate notions helped test the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) (Kroll and Stewart, 1994). It was demonstrated that participants responded more rapidly to the related targets (translation equivalents) than to the unrelated ones (words in L I and L2 that did not share meaning) and this was taken as evidence for a shared conceptual store.

Bibliografische Informationen