A Study Of Mental Lexicon Representation And Conceptual Accessing In Kazak-Chinese Bilinguals

With the popularity of bilingual education and teaching in the central and westernregions in China, it is necessary to understand the present situation of the minoritybilingual learning Chinese as a second language, explore the semantic characterizationand internal mechanism of the two languages from the perspective of cognitivepsychology. This is not only an important part in the studies of bilingual representation,which can enrich and complement the study of bilingual knowledge representation theoryand framework, but also it can provide psychological theory basis and guidance forbilingual education and teaching of the Xinjiang region.This study first makes a systematic review about the concept of bilingual mentallexicon representation, the history and current situation of bilingual of domestic andforeign researches and the paradigms and methods of bilingual researches. Then based onreference of the review, in order to explore the valuable problems and a more scientificand effective method of cross-language long-term repetition priming paradigm to explorethe mental lexicon representation and semantic access of advanced skilled and unskilledKazak-Han bilingual (namely the first language for the Kazak language, second languagefor Chinese bilinguals). Study one through experiment1of categorical judgment task andexperiment2of lexical decision task for skilled and unskilled Kazak-Han bilingualexplored the mental lexicon semantic representation and lexical representation on thecondition of same language (ha-ha) and cross-language (han-ha). Study two, throughexperiment3and4using the learning phase for categorical judgment, testing phase forlexical decision tasks for skilled and unskilled Kazak-Han bilingual investigated thelexical access mode of the second language, in addition, experiment5through thephonological mediation priming combined with cross-language long-term repetitionpriming paradigm to further investigate the role of the phonology in second languagesemantic access paradigm of skilled and unskilled Kazak-Han bilingual.The results show that:(1) Both the skilled Kazak-Han bilinguals and the unskilledKazak-Han bilinguals whose characterization of the mental lexicon is the Kazakh andChinese semantic concept is shared, but lexical representation is separation, support theview that the representation of semantic concept is shared, lexical representation isseparation.(2) With different proficiency of Kazak-Han bilinguals, Chinese as thesecond language has different access to the shared conceptual representation. The skilledKazak-Han bilinguals may not rely on the L1lexical representation and direct access to the shared representation; the Unskilled Kazak-Han bilinguals who firstly access thelexical representation layer of the first language and then can access to the sharedconceptual representation system. Accordingly, the skilled Kazak-Han bilinguals supportthe concept mediation model; the unskilled Kazak-Han bilinguals support the wordassociation model.(3)The phonetic representation information of the first language isactivated in the process of accessing to the lexical access of the second language andproduce the intermediary priming effect.(4) The second language proficiency has effecton the Kazak-Han bilinguals’ mode of the second language lexical access.