The Role Of Mental Lexicon In Bilingual Understanding

The relationship between bilingual mental lexicons is one of the important issues in bilingual research.Researchers generally divide the mental lexicon into two levels: One is conceptual level,which stands for concept representations;the other is lexical level/which stands for phonological and orthographic representations.The traditional idea is that bilingual's two languages have shared concept representations and independent lexical representations.But the understanding of bilingual lexicons is still not consistent. There are more and more studies in favor of the idea that bilingual's two languages not only have shared concept representations,but also have interactions between lexical level. Studies on bilingual mental lexicons used different tasks,such as lexical decision,word naming,semantic categoration et al.We suggest that the reason why different studies got different results is different tasks examine different representations and different links between bilingual lexicons.Therefore,this study aims to examine the role of mental lexicon in bilingual understanding.Putting bilingual lexicons and task demands together can deepen the understanding of bilingual representation mechanism and facilitate language learning.In experiment 1 ,we use word fragment completion task to examine the role of bilingual lexicons in bilingual understanding when lexical representations are activated.In experiment 1 ,we use word fragment completion task to examine the role of bilingual lexicons in bilingual understanding when lexical representations are mainly activated.In experiment 2,we use free recall task to examine the role of bilingual lexicons in bilingual understanding when conceptual representations are mainly activated. In experiment 3,we use recognition task to examine the role of bilingual lexicons in bilingual understanding when conceptual representations and lexical representations are mainly activated.In addition,to examine whether there is asymmetry between bilingual lexicons,there are two response types.Half of the subjects response to Chinese words,and half of the subjects response to English words.The results show (1)With different representations being activated in different tasks,different links between bilingual lexicons were activated.And the influence of different representations changed with the activation of different links between bilingual lexicons.In word fragment completion task,phonological similarity played important role while semantic similarity hardly played any role.In free recall task, semantic similarity played important role while phonological similarity hardly played any role.In recognition task, both semantic similarity and phonological similarity played important role.(2)There is no asymmetry between bilingual lexicons.In free recall and recognition,and the result has siginificant consistency in two response types.(3)Bilingual's two languages have mixed representations in the brain.There are links between both conceptual level and lexical level within bilingual lexicons.The mental representations of two languages can be activated parallelly.(4)Neither complete language selective hypothesis nor complete language non-selective hypothesis fully describes bilingual's language representation mechanism.This result arises because the various experimental tasks emphasize different processes.(5)The language task schemas of two languages are activated.While responsing to one language,bilinguals cannot completely exhibit the activation of non-target language task schema.