采用长时重复启动范式探讨母语为汉语的中-英双语者语言理解中非加工语言的激活状况。实验1和实验2使用词汇判断任务,实验3和实验4使用概念判断任务。在每个实验的第一个小实验中,非加工语言是英文,在每个实验的第二个小实验中,非加工语言是中文。实验1和实验3探讨学习阶段的非加工词在测验阶段呈现时能否出现长时重复启动效应,从而检验双语者语言理解中非加工语言有没有自动激活;实验2和实验4探讨学习阶段的非加工词在测验阶段以翻译对等词呈现时能否出现长时重复启动效应,从而检验双语者语言理解中非加工语言的语义有没有自动激活。总的实验结果表明,母语为汉语的中-英双语者在语言理解过程中,加工一种语言(目标语言)时,非加工语言(要求被试忽略的另一种语言)会自动激活,但在词汇任务情境中,非加工语言只在词汇层面上激活,其语义不会自动激活,而在概念任务情境中,非加工语言的词汇层面和语义层面都会自动激活。
Bilingual individuals manage to understand one of their languages without apparent interference from the other. How, then, do bilinguals avoid the language interference and maintain their focus on the target language?Existent studies have provided inconsistent data about the activation of two languages with explicit task paradigms. Although most prominent theories of bilingualism assume that mental representation of languages include a lexical level and a conceptual level, the notion of activation is ill-defined and it is unclear to what extent the words from the non-attended language are processed for bilinguals. Therefore, this study was designed to further investigate the activation of non-attended language in language comprehension with innovative paradigms and different tasks-the lexical decision task and the conceptual decision task. Two hundred students majoring in English at South China Normal University participated in the study and were randomly divided into different experiments. All participants in the present experiments were Chinese natives, and for whom English was their second language. Each experiment consisted of a study block and a test block. In the study block, Chinese and English words presented one at a time randomly, and bilingual participants were instructed to make a lexical decision (Experiment I and 2) or a concept decision (Experiment 3 and 4) only to one language (target language) while ignoring the other language (non-attended language). Study status (studied vs. unstudied) was manipulated in the test block. The same-language repetition priming was used in Experiment 1 and 3, which non-attended language words presented in the study block were repeated in the test block. The cross-language repetition priming condition was used in Experiment 2 and 4, which non-attened language words were presented in the study block and their translation equivalents were presented in the test block. The response times and accurate rates were recorded. In experiment 1 and 3, t