A Study Of Bilingual Concept Representation In Malaysian CSL Learners

With the increase of intercultural communication,many people can speak more than one language.The representation of mental lexicon of bilinguals has become a concern of psycholinguists.Bilingual representation refers to the existing form of language knowledge in bilinguals,including the storage mode,connection mode and vocabulary extraction mechanism.Previous studies show that bilingual representation can be divided into two levels:lexical representation and concept representation.Lexical representation is stored separately,the storage of concept representation has not been determined.Some studies support that bilingual conceptual representation is separate(Kolers,1963;Taylor,1976;Lucas et al.,2004),others support that bilingual conceptual representation is shared(Papaioannou&Padilla,1982;Zeelenberg&pecher,2003;Morey et al.,2005).Therefore,the concept representation of bilinguals is worth exploring,more experimental evidence is needed.With a long history,the study of bilingual representation started in the 1950s,but up to now,most of the evidences mainly come from Indo-European language represented by English,and research on Chinese learners is rare.Chinese is different from the Indo-European language,which has a unique character system.It is a question worthy of discussion that whether the bilingual concept representation of Chinese learners is different from other language learners.In addition,throughout the previous studies,it can be found that researchers pay more attention to the representation of concrete concepts,while the representation of abstract concepts is rarely discussed.Therefore,our study uses Zeelenberg&pecher’s(2003)paradigm to explore the conceptual representation of bilinguals with 50 proficient Malay Chinese learners,and two types of words(concrete words and abstract words)is experimental materials.This study consists of three groups of experiments,each group is divided into experiment A and experiment B according to the material abstractness.Experiment A is the study of concrete words and experiment B is the study of abstract words.Each experiment consists of two stages:the first stage of learning and the second stage of testing.In the testing stage,half of the materials are "learned" words.that is,words are presented in the learning stage.The paper analyzes concept representation of bilinguals by examining whether the condition of "learned" can promote the processing of subjects.The tasks of the three groups of experiments are all conceptual implicit memory tasks.In experiment A,the subjects are asked to judge whether the words are living or nonliving words.In Experiment B,the subjects are asked to judge whether the words are positive or negative words.Experiment 1 is first language priming first language experiment.The results show that both the concrete word experiment and the abstract word experiment have significant priming effect;Experiment 2 is second language priming first language experiment,and Experiment 3 is first language priming second language experiment Results show that there is no priming effect in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3.To sum up,we come to conclusions:1.The bilingual concept representation of proficient Malay Chinese Learners is separate,and the second language concept representation is not included in the first language concept representation2.Concept abstractness has no significant influence on Bilingual concept representation.For proficient Malay Chinese learners,the storage mode of concrete concept and abstract concept are all separate.In addition,it is found that the accuracy of processing abstract words is higher than that of concrete words,which is related to the representation differences of different types of words.Dual coding theory holds that abstract word representation depends on language system,while concrete word representation depends on language system and perceptual system.Processing words of different conceptual abstractions need to activate different amounts of information in the same short time,thus,the processing of specific words is difficult to abstract words,and the accuracy is lower.