A Bilingual Stroop Study On Proficient Chinese-English Bilinguals’ Non-nativeness Of The Mental Lexicon

Bilingual mental lexicon, as the expanding research of the mental lexicon, i. e.,monolingual mental lexicon in particular, has been attracting a huge amount ofattention in psycholinguistics. Recent studies concerning the conceptual store ofbilingual mental lexicon indicated that, there are three kinds of the relationalequivalences, namely,(near) equivalence,(partial) equivalence, and non-equivalence.Based on this together with the fact that few studies had discussed “non-nativeness”of bilingual mental lexicon, this thesis aimed at exploring its “non-native” featureamong those proficient second language (L2) learners.As far as the present research was concerned, both quantitative and qualitativeresearch methods were exploited. For the former, bilingual Stroop interference effectwas applied; and latter, thorough discussion together with obtained literature was thearena of investigation. In order to explore the “non-native” feature of the participants’bilingual mental lexicon, a group (n=30) of third year English majors, therefore, wasrequired to participate in the experiment. In the research, participants were required tofill a questionnaire (see Appendix A) for basic information first, and then, participatein the experiment with the program designed by E-prime1.1collecting their ACC(Accuracy) and RTs (Reaction Time) for forth-coming statistical investigation.Research questions thereby are,1) Does Stroop interference take place in proficientL2learners’ mental lexicon?2) Is the interference effect in L1equal to that in L2?In the research,2(Language Categories: L1, Chinese; L2, English)×2(SemanticConditions: Congruent; Incongruent) repeated measurement design was taken intoaccount, two-way repeated measures ANOVAs were utilized showing that,1) thereare robust Stroop interference effect (F(1,29)=5.574, p=.025<.05) both in L1(Chinese) and L2(English), indicating that semantic concepts are activated in bothtwo languages;2) given the RHM theory, two languages are asymmetrical on thepremise of equivalent conceptual representation in that RTs of Language Categoriesare statistically significant (p=.000<.001), which illustrates that non-nativeness, even for those proficient EFL learners, is a notable feature (surely, they are non-balancedbilinguals in the research) in the mental lexicon of EFL learners.From the above analysis, two Forms (F1/F2) get access to the shared concept (i.e.,color); as a further illustration, the linking strength between two Forms is varying,supporting the RHM. All seemed to support the “Non-nativeness” of the participants’bilingual mental lexicon, so much so that the implications for either future research orpedagogy can be obtained.