An Experimental Study On Semantic Access Model Of Tibetan-Chinese-English Trilinguals

Bilingualism and multilingualism have drawn extensive attention of scholars in linguistics,psychology,neurology,cognitive science and other fields since the 1950 s.Researchers have made much effort in detecting how the two languages of bilinguals are stored and represented in their mental lexicons.Now it is well accepted that the lexical information of each language of multilinguals is stored separately either in the conceptual representation or in the lexical representation(or form representation);the conceptual representation of all their languages is shared,but the lexical representations of different languages are stored independently.As to the connections between the conceptual representation and the lexical representations(i.e.semantic access),scholars have proposed several models,among which Word Association Model(Potter,Eckardt,& Feldman,1984),Concept Mediation Model(Potter et al.,1984)and Revised Hierarchical Model(RHM)(Kroll & Stewart,1994)have been widely cited.Trilingual semantic access models are explored on the basis of bilingual studies.Yet these trilingual studies are far from satisfaction for several reasons.Firstly,the addition of a third language further complexes the intricate interactions among languages,making trilingual studies more difficult than bilingual studies.Secondly,results about trilingual semantic access found in literature are inconsistent,especially about how L3 words connect to the concept,namely,L3 words can connect to the concept via L1 words,via L2 words,or via both.The inconsistency may result from the influences of various factors such as language proficiency,language similarity,instruction language,learning strategy,recency,word type,word frequency,etc.Thirdly,most foreign scholars take investigations into trilinguals whose three languages are Indo-European languages that bear similarities more or less.In this situation,it is difficult to disentangle the effects of language similarity and L1 dominant status / L2 Status Factor when explaining the influence of L1 or L2 on L3.Some domestic scholars try to rule out the influence of language similarity by targeting at trilinguals such as ethnic minority students,foreign language major students and international students whose three languages are typologically different.Among them,Cui & Zhang(2009)investigated Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals with a high-proficient Chinese and found that Tibetan and Chinese words were mediated by the concept,but no direct link existed between Tibetan and English words,and Chinese and English words followed the Word Association Model.However,Cui & Zhang’s claim that L1 and L2 adopted the Concept Mediated Model was based on one experiment that set L2 primes and L1 targets,without exploring the situation with L1 primes and L2 targets.The absence of unidirectional link cannot deny the existence of the lexical link between L1 and L2 words.By RHM,the lexical link remains even the conceptual link has been built.So Cui and Zhang’s study might miss the chance to find the lexical link between L1 and L2 words.Moreover,Cui and Zhang only investigated trilinguals with high-proficient L2.By RHM,low-proficient L2 words fail to connect to the concept directly,which may lead to different trilingual semantic access models.So trilinguals with L2 at various levels need to be studied for an overall understanding of the semantic access.The present study involved two groups of Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals:the Chinese Mediated Curriculum(CMC)group with highly proficient L2 and the Tibetan Mediated Curriculum(TMC)group with relatively proficient L2.Across-language repetition priming paradigm was used with a learning phase and a testing phase.In the learning phase,participants were asked to decide whether a word from one language of the trilinguals was a living thing or non-living thing(semantic decision task);in the testing phase,they were required to judge whether a word from another language was a real word or non-word(lexical decision task).The differences of reaction times and error rates between equivalents of the learned words(words presented in the learning phase)and equivalents of the unlearned words(words not presented in the learning phase)will indicate the occurrence of cross-language repetition priming effect;while no difference means no priming effect.By changing the priming and target language of different experiments,the relationship of any two languages was examined.DMDX was applied to record reaction times to words presented on the screen and errors of participants’ answers.Experiment data were analyzed in SPSS 22.The results showed that different semantic access models were adopted by the CMC and TMC groups.For the CMC group,both conceptual and lexical link were found between L1 and L2,supporting the Revised Hierarchical Model.In addition,L3 words connected to the concept via L2 rather than L1 words.For the TMC group,the associations between L1 and L2 were the same with that of the CMC group.And their L3 words accessed the concept via both L1 and L2,but L2 exerted an inhibitory influence.Language proficiency,instruction language,L2 Status Factor and perceived typological proximity are supposed to play a vital role in the interactions among the three languages.In addition,results in this study also provide evidence for non-selective activation.Besides,a common opinion that only the lexical representation is dealt with in a lexical decision task is called into question.