The Phonological Representation And Implicit Memory Advantages Of Phonological Similar Words In Less Proficient Chinese-English Bilinguals

What changes have happened in their language structure and representation mechanismwhen the monolingual become bilingual or even multilingual？A large number of languagecognition researchers interest in these changes. Linguistic informations is stored in brain withthe form of the mental lexicon. The view of bilingual mental lexicon shared at the semanticlevel but separated at the lexical level has been widely recognized. And researchers has putforward a series of bilingual theories and model assumptions.In recent years, a large number of prime-experimental studies which based on the implicitmemory system find that there exist cross-lingual effects at the lexical level among alphabetlanguages. The cross-lingual automatic activation among different languages is non-selected.The non-selected activation among alphabet languages may be associated with a similarorthography and glyph-phoneme-conversion. There is big different orthography betweenChinese-English. Is there an automatic activation of the similar phonological acrossChinese-English and whether this self-acting is non-selected? These will provide someevidences for us to explore the storage of the Chinese-English lexical representation.Meanwhile, memory is important for language learning. It will provide a reference for thesecond language learning by exploring whether the advantages of the similar words whichunder the implicit memory tasks or not.This study included three experiments:Experiment1adopted monosyllabic words which sound similarly and used mask-primingparadigm through the visual pathway in order to investigate the phonological representationof Chinese-English bilinguals. At the same time, the research used the ERP in order to inspectcortex characteristics when phonological activated. The results show that the differencesbetween the experimental group and control group are significant under the differentdirections. The ERP results show that the main effect of phonological at the time of200ms. Itappears on the left prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex when Chinese-English priming andthe interchange of frontal and parietal lobe when English-Chinese priming. The main effect ofphonological at the time of350ms appears on left frontal lobe when English-Chinese priming.Experiment2adopted monosyllabic words which sound similarly and used mask primingparadigm through the auditory-visual cross-modal in order to investigate the phonological representation of Chinese-English bilinguals. The results show that the differences betweenthe experimental group and control group are significant under the different directions.Experiment3adopted polysyllabic words which sound similar, used lexical decisionparadigm and implicit memory task in order to investigate the phonological representationbetween Chinese-English under vocabulary level. The results show that the main effect ofsemantic is significant. The main effect of phonological is significant only whenEnglish-Chinese priming. The main effect of implicit memory is significant in the differentpriming directions. The interaction between implicit memory and phonological is significant.But the interaction between implicit memory and semantic is not significant.This research concludes that:1. There is a non-selected activation of the similar phonological across Chinese-English inboth monosyllabic words and polysyllabic words which sound similarly. The bilingual mentallexicon is shared at the phonological level in less proficient Chinese-English bilinguals.2. Both Chinese and English have the some common cortical areas in the processing ofphonological activation. But there are also different cortical activation areas.3. The phonological similar words show some of the advantages along with the increase ofimplicit memory.