The Effect Of Working Memory Components For The Tibetan-mandarin Bilinguals’ Chinese Verbal Fluency

With the development of globalization,there are more and more bilinguals and multilinguals.Bilingual and multilingual phenomenon have attracted extensive attention of researchers.The study has found that verbal fluency of the second language of the biliguals is different from the monolinguals.Most of the previous studies chose the bilinguals of phonetic alphabets as subjects.The content of the studies is limited to the similarities and differences of verbal fluency between the two languages,and does not cosider the factors affecting the verbal fluency of bilinguals.This study is going to take Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals as subjects.We will examine systematically the second language’s verbal fluency of bilinguals and its influencing factors,and try to reveal the cognitive processing mechanism of bilinguals’ verbal fluency.A total of 240 Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals were selected as subjects.The classical dual-task paradigm was used to examine the phonetic fluency and semantic fluency of bilinguals’ second language.The influence of working memory components on the verbal fluency of bilinguals’ second language was investigated through comparison with Chinese native speakers.Among them,selecting the classic semantic fluency task and phonemic fluency task are the main task:phonemic fluency test asks subjects to say words at the beginning of a certain consonant within a limited time as much as possible;semantic fluency test asks subjects to say words belonging to a certain category within a limited time as much as possible.The number of words,the cluster size,and category swithches are selected for the main task.Secondary tasks are selected those which occupy subcompents of working memory:the actively series pronunciation task,the word shape judgment task,the computing task,the pasting task,the equality judgment task,the parity judgment task,and the randomly key tasks.The results show:(1)for the number of words and category swithches,Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ Chinese verbal fluency is significantly less than the native speakers in the two kinds of tasks,and the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ cluster size is also less than the native speakers,but the difference was not significant;(2)for the phonological loop,the main effect ofthe fluency type is significant on the three statistical indicators,the main effect of the load type in the number of words and category switches is significant,and under the condition of single and double loads,the difference value of semantic fluency is significantly greater than that of phoneme fluency;(3)for the visual-spatial template,the main effect of the fluency type is significant on the three statistical indicators,the main effect of the load type in the number of words and category switches is significant,and under the condition of single and double loads,the difference value of semantic fluency is significantly greater than that of phoneme fluency;(4)for the set shifting and inhibition function,the main effect of the fluency type is significant on the three statistical indicators,the main effect of the load type in the number of words and category switches is significant,the interaction between the two types is significant with the number of words as the index;(5)from the perspective of attention control resources and short-term storage resources,the fluency type and the load type have significantly main effect on the three statistical indicators,the interaction between the two types is significant with the number of words and category switches.This study draws the following conclusions:(1)The verbal fluency of the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ second languge was significantly lower than that of the native speakers;(2)Compareing to the phoneme fluency,the semantic fluency of the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ second languge is more dependent on the phonological loop and the visual-spatial template;(3)The set shifting and inhibition function of the central executive system have greater impact on the semantic fluency of the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ second languge.From the view of resource allocation,the short-term storage resources and attention control resources of the central executive system have the same influence on the two kinds of verbal fluency of the Tibetan-Mandarin bilinguals’ second language.