The Effect Of Second Language Proficiency On The Semantic Representation For Location Words And Physical Location In Mongolian-Chinese Bilinguals:an ERP Study

The problem of bilingual language representation has received considerableresearch interest. A common finding is that bilingual’s two languages have aseparate lexical representation and a shared conceptual representation. Therevised hierarchical model proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994) describesthat the link between L1and concepts is stronger than the link of L2.However,the connection is strengthed with the increasing proficiency of L2. Over thepast couple of years, there are different paradigms to adopt in the research ofbilingual’s representation, such as words judgment, equivalent translation andrepetition priming. In the present study, we investigated the characteristic ofbilingual’s memory representation by using inducer task and diagnostic task.For the inducer task, participants were instructed to make the keypressopposite to the meaning of the location words LEFT and RIGHT. For thediagnostic task, participants were instructed to make the keypress responseassigned to the color of the circles, while ignoring the stimulus location.In experiment1, some monolingual Chinese speakers and blingualMongolian/Chinese speakers were recruited. The results showed that therewas a three-way interaction of language correspondence group for RT. Formonolinguals, the Simon effect reversed when location words were Chinese,but not when the words were Mongolian. For bilinguals, the Simon effectinfluenced by Chinese and Mongolian didn’t differ significantly. Inexperiment2, the method and procedure were similar to experiment1, exceptthat the participants were only trilinguals and participants were asked toperform unsymmetrical inducer task in Chinese, Mongolian and English. Theresults showed that there was a two-way interaction of languagecorrespondence for RT. The Simon effect disappeared when they were mixedwith Chinese words. The Simon effect reversed when they were mixed withMongolian words. The Simon effect weakened when they were mixed withEnglish words. We found that the influence of Mongolian was similar toChinese but different from English. In experiment3,participants were Mongolian/Chinese bilinguals whose L2is primary language.The resultsshowed that the Simon effect was influenced more significant by L2than L1.In experiment3， the ERPs technique is used. Location words elicitedN170,and Simon task elicited P300.The conclusions were as follows. Firstly, balanced Mongolian/Chinesehave a shared representation for location words and physical locations.Secondly, proficiency of language could influence the connection strengthwith the shared semantic representation. Thirdly, language experience couldchange the dominant language of bilingual’s. In conclusion, these findingssupport the notion of The Revised Hierarchical Model of Bilingual MemoryRepresentation.