A Study Of Bilingual Conceptual Representation Of Unskilled Bilinguals

How is the overlap degree of the bilingual conceptual representation? The degree of semantic overlap may be fully shared, completely independent, or partially shared. More and more researches showed that the conceptual representations of translation equivalents are not totally shared.In this research, we study the overlap of bilingual conceptual representation by investigating the cultural-bias and concreteness of bilingual concepts of unskilled bilinguals. Experimentl adopted picture naming paradigm and Experiment2 adopted Stroop-similar paradigm to investigate the cultural-bias of bilingual concepts. As a result, we found that when well-learned English bilinguals were asked to name western culture pictures using English, compared with the reaction time to the eastern culture, the reaction time to western culture is shorter. However, the reaction time of less-learned English bilinguals showed no difference towards both cultural pictures.Experiment2 asked participants to decide whether the meaning of the background picture was the same with the target words inside the picture. When the meaning was the same and the target word was in Chinese, the accuracy were significantly higher towards the eastern pictures than the western pictures. When the meaning was different, the result turned opposite. When the meaning was the same and the target word was in English, the reaction time were significantly shorter towards the western pictures. When the meaning was different, the result showed trending towards significant. In sum, the result of Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 are accord with dual coding model. The conceptual representations of translation equivalents in this study are partially shared. Also, with the developing of the L2 skill, the sharing degree decreases.Experiment 3 adopted a mask priming paradigm to investigate the concreteness effect of the bilingual representations of less-skilled bilinguals. We found that in L1-L2 direction, when the meaning of prime words and target words were the same, compared to abstract words, the accuracy of concrete words was significantly higher. When the meaning of prime words and target words were different, the accuracy of concrete words and abstract words showed no difference. Only when the task was to make a decision on concrete words, the accuracy of the same meaning condition was significantly higher than different meaning condition, which suggests that in L1-L2 direction there is priming effect for the concrete words. All these results suggest that the overlap degree for translation equivalents of concrete words may be larger than abstract words.It indicated that the overlap between concrete words of translation equivalents are larger than abstracts words. All in all, the bilingual dual coding theory can best explain the result of our research.