Comprehension-based Language Switch Cost In Russian-English-Chinese Trilinguals

Bilingual language switching,as a social communication phenomenon,has been a hot topic in bilingual studies.Bilinguals often spend longer time and make more errors when they switch from one language to another compared with the situation when they are using only one language.This additional effort made by bilinguals in switching is called switch cost.For bilinguals who can speak at least two languages,they would show different amount of switch cost for different switching directions and between language pairs with different proficiency.There are two language proficiency related patterns of switch cost: symmetrical switch cost and asymmetrical switch cost.The switch costs for two languages with balanced proficiency tend to be symmetrical and for languages of unbalanced proficiency they tend to be asymmetrical.Apart from language proficiency,some other factors such as age of acquisition and frequency of language use have also been found to affect switch cost patterns according to literature.In terms of language typological relation,a factor that has been proved to also affect language switch cost patterns.Previous studies have mainly focused on the language pairs that belong to the same language family(e.g.the Indo-European language family)and studies that investigated the language pairs that belong to different language families are relatively less.Different orthographic characteristics of typologically different languages make the retrieval time to different languages diverse in the process of switching.What's more,as a language learned by the increasing population,Chinese has been researched mostly as L2 of bilinguals in previous studies on comprehension-based language switching(Cai & Meng,2013;Chen et al.,2015;Gao et al.,2018).Studies researched Chinese as L3 are very limited.These two types of studies of Chinese differ in terms of the underlying mechanisms.Chinese as L3 is learned through a more complex language acquisition mechanism contributed by the effects from L1 and L2,while it is learned as an L2 under the cross-linguistic influence from only one language,the L1.Therefore,the present study has combined the language pairs that belong to Indo-European language family and Sino-Tibetan language family and aims to investigate the characteristics of comprehension-based language switch cost of Russian-English-Chinese trilinguals.Results of the study are expected to shed light on language control mechanisms underlying the selection of the target language in language comprehension switch by trilinguals learning Chinese as a third language.In the present study,20 Russian-English-Chinese trililnguals attended three behavioral experiments in which they were required to do lexical recognition tasks in the switching modes of Russian-English,English-Chinese and Russian-Chinese.The three experiments were designed to answer the following questions:Question 1: Does switch cost occur in the lexical recognition tasks when Russian-English-Chinese trilingual students switch between Russian and English?Question 2: Does switch cost occur in the lexical recognition tasks when Russian-English-Chinese trilingual students switch between English and Chinese?Question 3: Does switch cost occur in the lexical recognition tasks when Russian-English-Chinese trilingual students switch between Russian and Chinese?The independent variables in this study were languages and tasks and thedependent variables were response times and error rates.The study recruited 20Russian-English-Chinese trilingual freshmen majoring in Chinese in Lanzhou University as participants.The 20 participants were asked to do the lexical recognition tasks by recognizing the items as words or non-words.The response times and error rates obtained from the three experiments were recorded by DMDX software.The data were collected by WPS-2019 and analyzed by SPSS-20.The findings of the study are as follows:(1)As for Russian-English switching,there was switch cost to English rather than to Russian.In the process of switching,longer retrieval time and higher error rate were observed when the participants switched to the relatively less proficient language,while less retrieval time and lower error rate were observed for the relatively more proficient language.The results of Experiment 1 were in line with language unspecific selection hypothesis(Green,1998)and the BIA model(Dijkstra& Van Heuven,1998;Grainger & Dijkstra,1992).(2)As for English-Chinese switching,switch cost did not occur to both English and Chinese.In other words,when the two languages had relatively balanced proficiency,switch cost did not occur to both languages.The results of Experiment 2supported language specific selection hypothesis(Costa & Mikel,2004).(3)As for Russian-Chinese switching,switch cost occurred to Chinese rather than to Russian.In the process of switching,longer retrieval time and higher error rate were observed when the participants switched to the relatively less proficient language,while less retrieval time and lower error rate were observed for therelatively more proficient language.The results of Experiment 3 were in line with language unspecific selection hypothesis(Green,1998)and the BIA model(Dijkstra& Van Heuven,1998;Grainger & Dijkstra,1992).In conclusion,language proficiency can affect switch cost.Switch cost does not occur to the language pairs with relatively balanced proficiency but occurs to the language pairs with unbalanced proficiency.Meanwhile,switch cost occurs to the relatively less proficient language rather than to the relatively more proficient language in the process of comprehension-based language switching.What's more,language unspecific selection hypothesis(Green,1998),language specific selection hypothesis(Costa & Mikel,2004)and the BIA model(Dijkstra & Van Heuven,1998;Grainger & Dijkstra,1992)are not antagonistic,all of them can be used to explain comprehension-based language switch cost of trilinguals with different language proficiency.