Effects Of Cognate Status And Word Class On Trilinguals’ L2 Word Processing

In bilingualism and multilingualism,a large body of studies has been investi-gating whether bilingual and multilingual lexical access is selective or nonselective.Cognates have been widely used to investigate bilingual speakers’ lexical access and were found to facilitate word recognition in both L2 and L1,which supported the non-selective lexical access account.However,studies on trilingual speakers were fewer,and the results were not unanimous.Studies that focused on how a later learned lan-guage could affect earlier learned language were particularly rare.Therefore,the cur-rent thesis aims to investigate how L2-L3 cognates can influence unbalanced trilin-guals’ L2 word recognition both in isolation and in sentence context,and examine how word class could modulate the effect.Two empirical studies were conducted.Experiment 1 adopted the lexical deci-sion paradigm.Unbalanced Chinese-English-German trilinguals read cognate and noncognate nouns and verbs alongside pseudowords in their L2 and judged whether the presented word was real or not.Analysis of reaction times showed that cognate nouns induced an inhibition effect while cognate verbs showed no effects.Experiment 2 embedded the target words of Experiment 1 into low-constraint sentence contexts.Chinese—English—German trilinguals read the sentences on the screen while their eye movements were being monitored.Early-stage reading measures showed that cognate nouns were inhibited and were read slower than noncognate nouns,while cognate and noncognate verbs did not show any significant difference.In late-stage reading measures,however,no differences were observed.It was also noticed that nouns were constantly read more slowly than verbs in both experiments.Results indicated that when Chinese-English-German trilinguals read English words,cognate nouns could lead to an inhibition effect.Such an inhibition effect could be due to the coactivation and competition of both representations in the two foreign languages and may be reduced when sentence contexts are present.On the other hand,verbs showed no cognate effect,and this might be because the complexity of verb representations led to a weaker mapping across languages.The uncommon noun pro-cessing disadvantage in the study was argued to be a result of the interplay between concreteness and word class.The current study supported the nonselective account and brought new insights into multilingual word recognition.