The Impact Of L2 Acquisition Age On The Mental Lexicon Representation Of Chinese-English Bilinguals: Evidence From A Bilingual Stroop Task

A bilingual Stroop task was used to examine if L2 acquisition age has influences on the mental lexicon representation of Chinese-English bilinguals with different degrees of L2 proficiency. We tested 20 early bilinguals who started to learn English at 3 years old and 20 late bilinguals at 13 years old with different English proficiency. Consistent with previous research, all subjects showed in both response languages greater intralingual interference than interlingual interference. The results of repeated measures analysis of variance showed the three-way interaction of stimulus language and response language and L2 acquisition age was marginally significant for high-proficiency subjects, implicating the bilingual mental lexicon representation of high-proficiency bilinguals is affected by the age of L2 acquisition. Most importantly, a one-way factor analysis of variance with L2 acquisition age as the independent variable reveals that the difference between high-proficiency early and late bilinguals is significant in the condition in which they saw Chinese color words and were asked to name the ink color in L2. The finding implicated that the associative links between the corresponding words in the two languages for high-proficiency early bilinguals is stronger than for high-proficiency late bilinguals. It seems that early bilinguals and late bilinguals with high proficiency may access their two languages via different mental links.