888 - London Dixon / Mapping Mono- and Multimorphemic Units Across the Chinese-English Bilingual Lexicon
888 - London Dixon / Mapping Mono- and Multimorphemic Units Across the Chinese-English Bilingual Lexicon
Wednesday October 15, London Dixon defends her 888, "Mapping Mono- and Multimorphemic Units Across the Chinese-English Bilingual Lexicon."
Do bilinguals’ first and second languages interact during visual and auditory processing? Extensive research suggests that the bilingual lexicon is non-selective, leading to cross-linguistic activation and competition during lexical access (Kroll et al., 2014). Many theories of bilingual lexical access have been built on experiments that use monomorphemic stimuli. This has left a gap in the literature on how multimorphemic units and monomorphemic units map crosslinguistically. The broad aim of this current research is to better understand the mapping between mono- and multimorphemic units within the bilingual lexicon: how does one’s first language (L1) affect the morphological organization of one’s second language (L2)? Mandarin Chinese- English bilinguals provide an excellent case study for this question of cross-linguistic morphological organization. Mandarin Chinese makes extensive use of compounding as a means of morphological productivity, and it has been proposed that this leads to a lexicon with a different organization relative to English (Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1995). The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) proposes that during early stages of adult second language learning, initial connections between translation equivalents are made at the lexical level. Therefore, the current work investigates how having Mandarin Chinese as one’s first language affects the organization of the English lexicon as a second language. We additionally probed how task differences may affect the robustness of behavioral responses during online L2 processing. To do this, we conducted two experiments: a semantic relatedness experiment (Experiment 1) and a lexical decision experiment (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, Chinese- English bilinguals show evidence of accessing L1 translation equivalents in accuracy data but not in reaction time data. In Experiment 2, Chinese-English bilinguals show qualitatively different semantic priming results based on language proficiency. They show no evidence of accessing L1 translation equivalents in reaction time or accuracy data. We take our results as evidence that Chinese-English bilinguals show some evidence of accessing L1 translation equivalents during online L2 processing. However, this access is mediated by factors such as task, design, and proficiency level.