Experimental Study Of Lexical Representation And Semantic Access In Tibetan And Chinese Bilingual

Now no matter in China or at abroad, bilingualism and bilingual teaching have becomea common phenomenon. This phenomenon has aroused intersts of many scholars.Theywant to learn how two languages to exist in people’s mind, and how they can smoothlytransform in different situations. Generally researchers believe that a language storing inthe brain contains lexical and concepts.Through a large number of experiments, somescholars have found that two languages represent separately in the lexical level, the similarparts of two languages share the same representation, the different parts representseparately in the semantic level. At present, it is belive that bilinguals have a commonrepresentation in semantic level, but separated from each other at the lexical level.After resolving the major issues,researchers focus on the sharing ways.Theresearchers put the sharing way of concept representation into three kinds of models:vocabulary connection, concept regulation and modified hierarchical. Most of theories arefrom two kinds of alphabetic writing studies. In China, even if researchers put moreattentions on Chinese-English bilingual,but studies on Tibetan-Chinese bilingual is veryrare.Although Tibetan and Chinese belong to a same family of languages, but they havevery different wrting style.So if the conclusion is suitable for Tibetan-Chinese bilingual?This is a problem worthy to be probed into.This study used cross-language priming paradigm, picture naming and wordtranslation paradigm and cross-modal priming paradigm to explore the characters aboutTibetan-Chinese lexical representation and process.The conclusions are as followings:Experiment one used the cross-language repetition priming to explore cross-languagerepetition priming effects between Tibetan and Chinese under the conditions of conceptjudgment tasks. When Tibetan Words and Chinese words has a semantic correlation,therewas a priming effect, so they share one semantic representation.Experiment two used Picture naming and word translation experiment to explore howtwo languages to connect together. It finds that the speed of naming pictures is faster thanthe speed of translation. The results are not consistent with previous results. This showsthat (1) there is a new phonetic level when words from L1to L2.(2)from sharing conceptto L2,the words don’t go through L1. Due to the difference in Tibetan and Chinese,bilingual directly used Chinese lexical system.In experiment three, explore whether bilingual phonological process has primingeffect when materials have similar pronunciation in Tibetan and Chinese.The resultsuggest there is no priming effect of Tibetan and Chinese phonological process.