| Bilingualism has attracted a large amount of attention from linguists for several decades,among which bilingual mental lexicon is the key issue of interest.So far.researchers have reached the general consensus that bilingual mental lexicon representation consists of lexical representation and conceptual representation,in which the former is separately stored and the latter is shared stored.and the connection between lexical and conceptual representation,or semantic access,is in a dynamic development process.Specifically,L2 beginning learners access meaning by using lexical connections between L2 words and their L1 translation equivalents.and later,with their increasing L2 proficiency,learners gradually develop direct mappings from L2 forms to meanings instead of through their L1 translations(Williams.2015)In recent years,the number of people who have knowledge of multiple languages has grown remarkably,thus the question of what is special about multilingual mental lexicon has been heatedly discussed.Empirical studies have been conducted on trilingual mental lexicon,but compared with bilingual studies,researchers have not come to a unanimous conclusion in terms of trilingual mental lexical organization and semantic access.The gaps exist mainly in three perspectives.Firstly,previous studies have covered trilinguals with different three languages,such as French-English-Spanish.Chinese-English-Japanese,Tibetan-Chinese-English,Dutch-English-Chincse and so on.and the results have shown that these dif'ferent language types have led to different findings.Secondly,language proficiency plays a significant role in that low-level proficiency learners act differently with intermediate-level or with high-level proficiency learners.Thirdly,task presentation modal does make a difference as people perceive information not only through visual modal but also through auditory or a combination of visual and auditory modals.However,most studies only focus on visual modal.and little attention has been paid to auditory or visual-auditory modals.In order to bridge these gaps,this study adopts cross-language repetition priming paradigm,and takes Chinese-English-German trilinguals as participants,and uses visual,auditory and visual-auditory modals to present experiment tasks.Two experiments are designed to investigate the intermediary role of L1 Chinese and L2 English in L3 German semantic access respectively.The present study is conducted on E-Prime 3.0 and the data is analyzed by SPSS 22.0.The results are as following:Firstly with regard to the role of L1 Chinese in L3 German semantic access,for low-level proficiency learners,there is priming effect in three modals.and there is no significant difference in terms of priming effect among three modals;while for intermediate-level proficiency learners,there is no priming effect in three modalsSecondly,with regard to the role of L2 English in L3 German semantic access,for low-level proficiency learners,L2 English has priming effect and the visual modal leads to the biggest priming effect;while for intermediate-level proficiency learners.L2 English has no priming effect in L3 German's semantic access through all of the three modals.Thirdly,as for the priming effect between L1 and L2,1.2 English has bigger priming effect than L1 Chinese in visual modal for low-level proficiency learnersThe results show that low-level proficiency German learners access the 1.3 German semantic meaning by both L1 Chinese and L2 English.but with the increasing proficiency L3 German,Chinese-English-German trilinguals can build direct connections with semantic system.In a word,the present study comes to the conclusion that trilinguals' semantic access is not static but dynamic.It depends on various factors,such as language distance,language proficiency,task presentation modal,etc.Among all of these factors,trilinguals' semantic access is in accord with the economy principle,in other word,it would rather choose the easier way to access the meaning. |
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