An Experimental Study Of Cross-Language Association Model In Korean-Chinese-English Trilinguals

With a growing number of third language learners in the world,the role of L1 and L2 in L3 processing has aroused the interest of linguists.Substantial researches on bilingual memory representation have been carried out and yielded significant results.In the field of psycholinguistic studies,scholars have adopted a series of methodologies to examine the language processing of foreign language learners,such as word association task,semantic categorization task,etc.With the development of cognitive science,researchers incline to adopt on-line mechanism to investigate language processing,among which the most familiar ones are priming,picture naming,fMRI,etc.The employment of these on-line mechanisms has provided more accurate empirical evidence for the question of concern.The present study explored repetition priming effects of Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals in Yanbian University with on-line repetition priming research method.By observing the repetition priming effects of L3(English)to L2(Chinese)and L1(Korean)when study phase adopting the semantic categorization task and test phase adopting the lexical decision task,to determine whether Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals' L3 lexical processing is mediated by their L1 and/or L2.And to further explore the affect factors in its process.Major findings yielded from this study are as follows:Firstly,there was repetition priming effects of L3(English)to L2(Chinese),behavior of both two groups support word association model.When they are required to access L3 conceptual representation,it needs to access via L2 lexical representation.Secondly,as for the L3(English)and L1(Korean),in the condition of Min-Kao-Min group,there was repetition priming effects of L3 to L1,and RT and ACC data reveal that Min-Kao-Min learners rely on L1 during L3 processing.However,in the condition of Min-Kao-Han group,it was failed to obtain cross-language repetition priming effect.Thirdly,there are significant differences between two groups of participants,and L1 proficiency is the most important factor determining the response times and response accuracy of Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals during the experimental tasks.Above all,the word association model played an important role in exploring the repetition priming effects L3 to L2 and L1.The overall performance of Min-Kao-Min group is better than Min-Kao-Han group,mainly depending on the language proficiency,language dominance and orthographic similarity between the languages.Based on the current study,a tentative language association model of form-meaning mapping process is proposed for Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals.The findings of this study provide evidence for L1 proficiency and orthography similarity as important factor in multilinguals' visual word recognition.Theoretically,it gives a better understanding of multilinguals5 language processing.Pedagogically,the results of the experiment will provide some application values for foreign language teaching and learning based on bilinguals.