Models of mental lexicon in bilinguals with high and low second language experience : an experimental study of lexical access

Abstract

Five experiments are conducted to investigate lexical access in L1 and L2 by bilingual speakers and to explore the relationship between L2 experience and the process of lexical access. Experiment 1 is a Thai-English Stroop interference task in which subjects must name the colour of the ink of a conflicting colour word, e.g. "green" written in red ink. The stimuli were written in Thai or English and the subjects had to respond in either Thai or English, giving rise to four conditions, L1-L1, L1-L2, L2-L1, and L2-L2. This experiment revealed that the L1-L1 effect and the L2-L2 effect in the High experience -High group is higher than in the Low experience Low group. The L2-L2 effect in the High group is higher and closer to the L1-L1 effect than in the Low group. In the L1-L2 condition, the effect in the Low group is higher than the High group. Experiments 2-5 investigate lexical access using a cross-language version of the Semantic Priming Tasks in which subjects react to the kinship word on the screen whether it is a kinterm or not, before the word is shown on the screen it will be primed with a related term or unrelated term. Four bilingual groups were tested: (1) Thai-English, (2) English-Thai, (3) Mandarin-English, and (4) English-Mandarin bilinguals. Kinship is used as the semantic conceptual system for these experiments. The results of these four experiments demonstrate cross-language priming effects in both the High and the Low language experience groups. The different patterns of reaction time found in the cross language semantic priming experiments in subjects with high and low L2 experience are statistically significant. Results from all the experiments support the notion that there are specific L1 and L2 lexical systems, and also a common conceptual system for L1 and L2 words. In addition, the results imply that in bilinguals with low L2 experience, L1 words are retrieved via conceptual links and L2 words are retrieved via lexical links. However, in bilinguals with high L2 experience, accessing L2 words moves to a lexical basis, as a function of L2 ability.