Conceptual And Lexical Representation In Chinese-English-French Trilingual Mental Lexicon

Mental lexicon is an important component of bilingual memory research.The conceptual representation and lexical representation of bilingual mental lexicon are the focus of research.Researches on conceptual and lexical representations explore the way bilinguals organize,store and associate meaning and lexical knowledge in the mind.Previous studies have generally focused on the priming effect of the first language to the second language.Different task paradigms have been manipulated to investigate bilingual memory representation which found out that conceptual representation of two languages is integrated and lexical representation is separated.The increasing number of trilingual learners calls for vigorous research on the lexical and conceptual representation of trilingual learners.However.studies on the priming effect of L1 to L3 and L2 to L3 are still lacking.In addition,most of the studies on trilingual memory representation have been conducted on participants with low-proficiency level.Therefore,their results have certain limitations.In light of the above research gap.this thesis studies high-proficiency Chinese-English-French trilinguals with the cross-language repetitive priming paradigm to explore the lexical and conceptual representation characteristics of their mental lexicon.Two experiments,animacy decision task and lexical decision task,were designed to investigate the repetitive priming effect across languages.The participants were French-major undergraduates from a foreign language university.The results showed that:1)In the animacy decision task.there was no repetition priming effect between L1 and L3 under both the same-language and cross-language condition.There was a repetition priming effect between L2 and L3 under the same language condition,but no repetition priming effect under the cross-language condition.2)In the lexical decision task,there was repetition priming effect of L1 on L3 under the cross-language condition,but no repetition priming effect under the same language condition;There was no repetition priming effect between L2 and L3 under both the same-language and cross-language conditions.3)Under two task conditions.L2 has a negative priming effect on L3.The conclusion of this study can be drawn as follows1)The conceptual representation of L1 and L3 is partly shared and the lexical representation is partly separated for high-proficiency Chinese-English-French trilinguals,which support the revised hierarchy model;2)The conceptual representation of L2 and L3 is partly shared and the lexical representation is completely separated for high-proficiency Chinese-English-French trilinguals,which support the word association model;3)Both language proficiency level and language distance have important effects on the response time and error rate of the stimuli and further influence the link strength of the trilinguals’ mental lexicon.