The Cognitive Psychological Study On The Knowledge Representation Of Chinese-English Bilinguals

In the first part,the arthor reviews some concepts of knowledge representation,the methods of bilingual study and the recent study.With reference to the review,in order to explore how the Chinese-English Bilinguals represent the bilingual knowledge,using different tasks.the inter-language priming effect and the cross-language priming effect were investigated in two priming-category judgement experiments based individually on the semantic (Experiment I ) and phonological information (Experiment II ).Subjects were from Second Military Medicine University,Shanghai,China.In the experiment I ,no matter what the relation between the English targets and the primes was semantic associaton or homophones and similar phones.significant inter-language priming effect and the cross-language priming effect were obtained.But in the experiment II ,when the relation between the English targets and the primes was semantic associaton,no significant inter-language priming effect and the cross-language priming effect were found;when the English targets were the homophones and similar phones characters of the primes, significant inter-language priming effect and the cross-language priming effect were obtained.The two experiments showed:(l)The second language knowledge of Chinese-English Bilinguals are represented in the semantic and phonological. characters,which supported the Semantic Spreading Activation Model; (2)The Bilingual semantic representation of the Chinese-English Bilinguals is together stored;(3) Not only the second language lexical representation directly access to the conceptual representation,but also is connected with the lexical representation of its first language;(4)The phonological information of the second language lexical representation could be automatic activation;(5)The conceptual representation could be discreted with the bilingual lexical representation.In the experimentIII,in order to explore whether the link between the bilingual lexical representation is asymmetry,the word translation task was used. Subjects were 93 university students in Second Military Medicine University,Shanghai,China.The results showed: the link between the bilingual lexical representation is asymmetry,the link of L2-L1 is more strong than the link of L1-L2.