The Degree And Way Of Sharing Conceptual Representations Of Uyghur-Chinese Bilinguals: The Relationship Between Category And Theme

Whether concepts of words in different languages are represented in conceptual system bilinguals shared or not and what the way of the representation is are always issues that linguistic,psychological and pedagogical researchers want to find out.In recent years,long-term cross-language repetition priming adopted by investigator can reduce the probability of appearing the translation strategy in studies,so this issue can be studied more correctly using this task.Animacy decision task adopted in the long-term cross-language repetition priming is used to examine the activation of concepts of words organized by huge taxonomic(animacy)relationships,however,animacy is not a typical taxon in a strict sense,what's more,processing animacy decision task need to rely on cognitive control.Therefore,in order to enlarge the scope of conclusions of bilingual memory representation and overcome disadvantages of the tasks,it is important for us to examine the problem by improving tasks or using more angles.This study still adopted long-term cross-language repetition priming,we replaced animacy decision task to taxonomic categorization task or thematic categorization task.Taxonomic and thematic relationships are very typical semantics relationships examining whether words are activated or not,also,they can both fully activate concept and hardly rely on cognitive control.We invited high fluency and low fluency Uygur—Chinese bilinguals to participate our experiments.First of all,we examined the extents of concepts organized by taxonomic relationships and thematic relationships shared by different languages.Then,we examined the ways concepts shares.Finally,results obtained were compared.In experiment one,taxonomic categorization task or thematic categorization task was adopted both in the period of study and test to study the extend of concepts shared organized by taxonomic and thematic relations with high fluency and low fluency Uygur—Chinese bilinguals.In experiment two,taxonomic categorization task or thematic categorization task was adopted in the period of study and lexical decision task was adopted in the period of test to study the ways of concept shared with high fluency and low fluency Uygur—Chinese bilinguals.In more details,we examined whether there would appear studied priming effect in lexical decision task on the condition of within and between languages,then we inferred whether language 2 words accessed language 1 words when language 2 words accessed the concepts.Tasks of experiment three are the same as experiment two,the only difference was that we exchanged materials in the study period and test period.We similarly examined whether there would appear studied priming effect in lexical decision task on the condition of within and between languages,then we inferred whether language 1 words accessed language 2 words when language 1 words accessed the concepts.Finally,we concluded the modes in which words access concepts between languages based on results of this study and previous studies.Results are as follows:1.The result of experiment 1 was that materials organized by taxonomic relationships and thematic relationships in the period of test period both appeared studied priming effects within and between languages.Specifically,reaction time of words learned before was shorter than that of words not learned before,also reaction time of words whose translation equivalents were learned before were shorter than that of words not learned before.2.The result of experiment 2 appeared qualitative dissociation.On the condition of within language,no matter whether there was taxonomic categorization task or thematic categorization task in the period of study,studied priming effect both appeared in lexical decision task;On the condition of between languages,when there was taxonomic categorization task in the period of study,studied priming effect appeared in lexical decision task,when there was thematic categorization task in the period of study,studied priming effect did not appear in lexical decision task.3.The result of experiment 3 was that studied priming effect did not appear in lexical decision task no matter in taxonomic relationships or in thematic relationships.Results revealed some conclusions,the conceptual representation of words organized by taxonomic relationships and thematic relationships is shared in different languages,which further supports the accuracy and application of the theory of sharing representation of concept.Besides,language 2 words accessing language 1 words is the subprocess of language 2 words accessing concepts organized by taxonomic relationships,and language 1 words accessing language 2 words is not the subprocess of language 1 words accessing concepts organized by taxonomic relationships,which is more suitable for word association model;language 2 words accessing concepts organized by thematic relationships is hardly through accessing language 1 words,and language 1 words accessing language 2 words is not the subprocess of language 1 words accessing concepts organized by thematic relationships,which is more suitable for concept mediation model.In addition,the fluency of second language has little effect on results mentioned above,if the language similarity is high,differences in experimental results arised from difference between high fluency and low fluency of second language will be narrowed down.