Cross-linguistic Activation In Bilingual Lexical Processing

The issue of lexical representation has been an important topic in bilingual memory representation.Since 1980,there have been drastic debates on the issue of whether the bilingual representation is independent or shared.However,there is still no definite conclusion.In addition,most of these studies have been limited to groups whose native and second languages are both alphabetic.Less attention has been paid to those whose native and second languages are different language systems.Therefore,the present study will explore the issue of language representation of Chinese-English bilinguals.The long-term cross-language repetition paradigm based on implicit memory was adopted in this study,which was characterized by a “learning” phase and a testing phase.Priming words were presented in the “learning” phase,which was the process of exposing words in advance.Therefore,it was named as a “learning” process.And then,target words came out in the second phase.Between priming words and target words,there were a large number of items to be intervals.Characterized by the two phases,the long-term paradigm was different from short-term experiments with only a singular phase,allowing participants to activate non-target words unconsciously.As a result,it greatly reduced the possibility of explicit processing strategies.In the testing phase,if the implicit memory formed by priming words during the“learning” phase was activated,there would be a priming effect to prove the automatic activation of non-target language words.There were two experiments in this study.Experiment 1 consisted of a lexical decision task in which the lexical representation was inspected in both language directions(i.e.,L1-L2 and L2-L1).Experiment 2 consisted of an animacy decision task in which conceptual representation was inspected in both two directions.The study answered these questions: firstly,would the second language be activated by the first language? If so,did it happen at the lexical level or the conceptual level? Secondly,would the first language be activated by the second language? The contents for examining linguistic representations were as that in the first question.Thirdly,was cross-linguistic activation symmetrical? If any,which was the stronger activation direction?For answering these questions,this study investigated 160 Chinese-English college students.Each experiment involved two sub-experiments based on the language switching direction.In the first experiment,it turned out that significant priming effects were observed under both L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions and the amount of priming was significantly larger under the L2-L1 direction than that under the L1-L2 direction.As a corollary,no matter whether the non-target language was L1 or L2,the priming effect occurred with a smaller switching cost and larger priming amount under the L2-L1 direction and a bigger switching cost under the opposite direction.Results of Experiment 2 were as follows: there was a significant priming effect for both biological and non-biological words under the L1-L2 direction.Under the L2-L1 direction,there was a significant priming effect for non-biological words.However,there was no significant priming effect for biological words.In terms of the priming amount,the results of the two types of words were also different.In the non-biological word case,the priming amount under the L2-L1 direction was significantly larger than that under the L1-L2 direction.On the other hand,in the biological word case,the amount of priming under the L2-L1 direction was close to that under the L1-L2 direction.Taking all these factors into consideration,it was obvious that the priming effect occurred with a similar result like Experiment 1 in which there was a larger priming effect with a smaller switching cost under the L2-L1 direction.Together,the findings of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that there were priming effects in both two linguistic representations,which showed that non-target language was activated automatically.What’s more,asymmetric conversion remained with different switching costs under two directions.According to the experiments,there was a larger priming amount under the L2-L1 direction than that under the L1-L2 direction.In the end,the study can not only deepen the understanding of the bilingual word recognition system but also provide enlightenment for second language.