| The storage and connection of two or more languages of bilinguals in the mind has always been a hot topic in the field of bilingual research.It has been found that bilingual people store lexical information independently and semantic information together,and the lexical representation in second language could access to the semantic representation directly or through the lexical representation in first language.But the results mainly come from the studies of concrete words.The abstractness of vocabulary will affect the semantic representation and the access mechanism in bilingualism.In recent years,researchers have begun to pay attention to the abstract word representation and access of bilinguals.The study of bilingual abstract words will expand the research field of bilingual language cognition,help us understand the cognition of bilinguals more comprehensively and systematically,and then carry out bilingual teaching more effectively.As opposed to concrete words,abstract words are not relative to specific objects,nor can they be visualized and concretized.According to embodied cognition theory,the basis of abstract word representation was metaphor effect,and conceptual metaphor exists in different languages and cultures.Among the metaphors of abstract words,spatial metaphor represents abstract words through the concept of spatial dimension.The spatial metaphor effect of abstract words showed that when the spatial meaning of words was consistent with the spatial position of the reaction target,the subjects responded faster and better,which was called the lexical spatial effect.Further studies founded that the spatial metaphor effect in first language may also exist in second language.Moreover,the bilingual semantic information of abstract words which had spatial metaphorical effect in the second language stored together.However,existing studies had not considered the influence of spatial information on the bilingual semantic representation of abstract words.Considering that spatial metaphor was a semantic representation based on spatial location,it was necessary to further investigate the bilingual semantic representation of abstract words based on spatial information.The semantic access of bilingual vocabulary was closely related to semantic representation.Researches on abstract words showed that access mode affected the recognition of metaphorical information,and thus affected the strength of conceptual metaphorical connection.Therefore,will spatial metaphorical information influence the access mechanism of lexical representation in second language to shared semantic representation? Based on the spatial metaphor effect,this study will further investigate the access of abstract words in bilinguals.Existing studies had confirmed that moral words in different cultures generally had spatial metaphor effects.Based on the vertical spatial metaphor of moral words,this study selected Chinese-English bilinguals for investigation.There were three experiments in this study.First,we investigated whether moral words had vertical spatial metaphor effect in first language and second language.Then,we further investigated the semantic representation and access mechanism of abstract words.In this study,a psychological test system(www.dweipsy.com/lattice)was used for experimental design and testing.Experiment 1 examined the vertical spatial metaphor effect of moral words in first language and second language of Chinese-English bilinguals.In this study,42 subjects were selected and the spatial Stroop paradigm was adopted.The experimental design was 2(vocabulary types: moral words and immoral words)× 2(position of vocabulary:high position and low position on screen),a three factor intra subject experimental design,with dependent variables of reaction time and accuracy.The experimental task is to make moral and immoral judgments on words presented in different positions.The results showed that both first and second language moral words of Chinese-English bilinguals had spatial metaphorical effect,which means that moral words were related to high positions,and immoral words were related to low positions.This result laid the foundation for Experiment 2 and Experiment 3.Experiment 2 examined the semantic representation of moral words of ChineseEnglish bilingual and whether the semantic representation was affected by the spatial information of abstract words.In this study,42 subjects were selected and the crosslanguage long-term repetition priming paradigm was adopted.The experimental design was 2(learning type: learned and not learned)× 2(language conditions: same language conditions and cross language conditions)× 2(consistency of lexical presentation position and spatial metaphor: consistency and inconsistency),a three factor intra subject experimental design,with dependent variables of reaction time and accuracy.The experiment was divided into learning stage and test stage.The experimental tasks were to make moral and immoral judgments on words presented in different positions.The results showed that when the position of vocabulary presentation was consistent with the metaphorical effect,there was a priming effect;when the position of the word was inconsistent with the metaphorical effect,the priming effect disappeared.It showed that the semantic representation of moral words of Chinese-English bilinguals was influenced by the spatial information.Experiment 3 examined the access mechanism of moral words from lexical representation in second language to semantic representation of Chinese-English bilinguals.In this study,40 subjects were selected and the cross-language long-term repetition priming paradigm was adopted.The experimental design was 2(learning type:learned and not learned)× 2(language conditions: same language conditions and cross language conditions)× 2(consistency of lexical presentation position and spatial metaphor: consistency and inconsistency),a three factor intra subject experimental design,with dependent variables of reaction time and accuracy.The experiment was divided into learning stage and test stage.The task of the learning stage was to make moral and immoral judgments on words presented in different positions;the test phase task was to make true and false word judgment on words presented in different positions.The results showed that the priming effect was not significant when the location of vocabulary was consistent with the metaphor effect,indicating that the access process from lexical representation in second language to semantic representation did not go through the lexical representation in first language.When the position of the convergence was inconsistent with the metaphorical effect,the priming effect occurred,indicating that the access process from lexical representation in second language to semantic representation went through the lexical representation in first language.This showed that the access mechanism of moral words from lexical representation in second language to semantic representation of Chinese-English bilinguals was affected by the spatial information.Through three experiments,this study drew the following conclusions:(1)The spatial metaphor effect of moral words existed in both first and second language of Chinese-English bilinguals.(2)The semantic representation of moral words of Chinese-English bilinguals was influenced by the spatial information.(3)The access mechanism of moral words from lexical representation in second language to semantic representation of Chinese-English bilinguals was affected by the spatial information. |
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