A Study On The Activation Of Non - Target Language In The Understanding Of Language In Chinese - English

With the continuous improvement of the social development, the phenomenon of bilingual and multilingual is becoming common, people who can grasp two or even more different language gradually increases. Many Cognitive psychologists and linguists have been concerned on the important topic of bilingual processing mechanism. The non-target language activation status in bilingual comprehension has attracted researchers’ attention in recent years.Based on the results from previous bilingual research, some theories have been formed on the status of non-attended language, but there are still controversial among these researchers. The central dispute focused on the activation status of the non-attended language during language comprehension, whether it is automatically activated or still in a state of suppression. If the non-target language vocabulary has been automatically activated, and then the activation to what level whether the vocabulary and concepts layers all active. The exploring of non-attended language activation mechanism helps the research of bilingual memory representation mechanism and can provide some guidance and advice on second language learning.In view of the phenomenon of bilingual studies in our country, there are seldom investigates on the minority bilinguals who learn Chinese as their second language. Minority groups as an important part of our national members, their language development and research should arouse our attention. Therefore we designed the research to explore the non-attended language activation status of early and proficient Uyghur-Chinese bilingual whose native language is Uyghur. The research used the cross-language priming paradigm to examine the activation status in different condition such as lexical decision tasks and conceptual identify task, we also considered the familiarity of target language additionally. The whole study includes four large experiments, and each big experiment comprise two small experiments, the first one set the native language (L1) as the target language, the second one set the second language (L2) as the target language.Experiment1used word discrimination task to examine whether the long repetition priming effect occurs when the non-target language words were neglected in the learning phase, in order to investigate whether the non-target language is automatically activated, Experiment2used concept identify task to study the activation status. The research designed experiment3and experiment4to investigated non-target language activation level, whether the vocabulary layer and conceptual layer were all activated. The following two experiments used pictures as the stimulates of testing phase whose corresponding non-target language vocabulary had been appeared in the learning phase, in order to examine whether priming effect occurs and make the conclusion whether the conceptual layer of non-target language had been activated under different processing conditions.The main conclusions of the present study are as follows:(1)The non-target language automatically activated no matter in shallow processing and deep processing conditions when bilinguals completed the language comprehension task. The non-target language were all automatically activated no matter which language as the target language, as a result that the advantages and disadvantages of the two languages competitive inhibition was not significant.(2)Under vocabulary discrimination task in learning phase, bilinguals’reaction time on pictures whose corresponding non-target vocabulary not showed significant difference in have been learned and have not been learned conditions, that is, no cross-language priming effect occurred. As a result that the automatic activation of the non-target language only exists in vocabulary layer and the conceptual layer is in the inhibitory state under the shallow processing mission.(3) Under concept judgmental task in learning phase, bilinguals’reaction time on pictures whose corresponding non-target vocabulary showed significant difference in have been learned and have not been learned conditions, that is, cross-language priming effect occurred. As a result that the automatic activation of non-target language exists in vocabulary layer and the conceptual layer under the deep processing mission.(4)Early proficient Uyghur-Chinese bilingual’non-target language activated status receive the influences both from the bottom-up cognitive language comprehension task and the top-down decision mechanism.