The Mechanism Of Lexical Access In Bilingual Speech Production

Previous studies have found that the process of lexical access in bilingual speech production, non-target language vocabulary has also been activated. But the activation of non-target language vocabulary to what level of non-target language vocabulary, is only at the level of lemma selection activate or further activate the voice level, has not yet conclusive. Previous researches adopted the Picture-word interference paradigm and the language switching paradigm to answer the question, but because of the limitation of the two paradigms, resulting in controversial results. In this research, using the phoneme monitoring tasks of different level of the SOA conditions, investigated the activation of non-target language. Experiment1showed a phoneme to bilingual1000ms, after that, present a picture to the bilingual, require them to decide the pronunciation of the phoneme presented earlier the same as the first pronunciation of the picture English name. The key point is that the pronunciation of the phoneme presented earlier may be the picture of Chinese pronunciation of naming the first letter of the word, rather than picture naming the first letter of the word pronunciation in English. No significant differences in reaction time was found that when bilingual rejected Chinese picture naming of the phonemes of the word than when the phoneme is not English name or Chinese name. In other words, in the SOA-1000ms, the phoneme of non-target language words did not get activated. Also in experiment2and experiment3, the SOA+200ms and the SOA+400ms, using the phoneme monitoring task, non-target language words in the phoneme level has not been activated. The result is consistent with hermans (2010) research, demonstrated that bilingual speech system is a dynamic system by operating with different words activation.