A Cognitive Research On English Lexical Access For Mongolian Trilingual Based On ERP

With the rise of international communication, learning English has become an indispensible task faced by the minority nationalities in China. Hence, the number of trilingual is rocketing. Among them, Mongolian trilingual is featured with uniqueness. This article involves four groups of cognitive experiment from visual and auditory channels, aiming to explore the time course of semantic activation in the process of lexical access, the impact of characters and speech on lexical access of English and the relationship of L3(English) to L1(Mongolian) and L3(English) to L2(Chinese). The design is based on event-related potentials (ERP technology), which records the sensory activity and cognitive process online continuously. Separating ERP components from the scalp to determine the psychological activity of activated brain area, we can locate the endogenous nerve of overt behavior. The study results serve as an effective supplement in cognitive study of vocabulary. Besides, it can provide theoretical guidance for English teaching.Specific conclusions include:1) The exits of priming effect in all four groups of experiment indicate the lexical concept of Mongolian, Chinese and English is stored together. All three languages has shared semantic layer but different concept layers, and the conceptual representation of English (L3) is accessed through translation of Mongolian (L1) and Chinese (L2) as mediation;2) In terms of the interaction of three languages, Mongolian college students are better at the judgment task when the material presented is L3(English) to L2(Chinese) rather than L3(English) to L1(Mongolian), which can be deduced that the third language acquisition (English) depends largely on the second language (Chinese) rather than their mother tongue (Mongolian);3) The emergence of P300indicates the processing of speech take place before semantic processing of English vocabulary. In addition, the semantic processing takes shorter time though the representation of speech than characters. Those facts prove Mongolian trilingual achieve semantic access with the help of speech activation, which is largely affected by their mother tongue.