The influence of contextual constraint and L2 proficiency on bilingual lexical access: evidence from eye movements of Japanese-Chinese bilinguals

• Main Authors: Weng, Yi Lun, 翁翊倫
• Other Authors: Tsai, Jie Li
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/aqk5yf

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言學研究所 === 104 === For decades, psycholinguists have disputes on the organization of the two language systems of bilinguals’ brain and how they retrieve lexical representations. The selective access hypothesis predicts that two languages are independent in the brain and bilinguals activate only one lexicon at a time while reading or speaking. Alternatively, non-selective access hypothesis predicts that two languages share an integrated conception representation, so representations from both languages are accessed simultaneously during comprehension. So far, many bilingual studies have demonstrated that bilingual lexical access is non-selective. However, these studies usually used priming paradigm such as lexical decision task which words are presented in isolation, ignoring the role of context in the bilingual lexical access processing. According to the monolingual literature, it is clear that lexical ambiguity resolution is influenced by the surrounding sentence context. While most of the previous studies investigated highly proficient bilinguals, the same question about non-selective access could also be asked of less proficient bilinguals. Moreover, most of results are based on alphabetic writing systems such as English-French or Dutch; only few of them examined the non-alphabetic systems. Besides, since bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study also examined the result of language proficiency from class level and eye movement indexs to confirm which one is more accurate.The present study aimed to examine whether Japanese-Chinese bilingual lexical access is non-selective and whether the context and L2 proficiency modulate the word recognition processing. Experiment manipulated contextual constraint (high or low constraint) and target word types (cognates, interlingual homographs, or Chinese words), using eye movement recordings to investigate the effects of contextual constraint for bilingual lexical access when reading Chinese sentences by Japanese-Chinese bilinguals, L1 and L2 proficiency were measured. The results support the non-selective hypothesis. Both sentence context and L2 proficiency could affect the bilingual lexical access. According to class level analysis, L2 proficiency has significant interaction with other effects in the late processing stage. The eye movement measures that reflects early processing of target words showed significant interlingual homograph interference and cognate facilitation in the higher proficient bilinguals. However, only cognate facilitation was observed for high-constraint sentences in the lower proficient bilinguals and no effect was founded in the low-constraint sentences. On the other hand, the eye movement index analysis showed L2 proficiency has significant interaction with other effects in the early processing stage, demonstrating the L2 reading proficiency can be measured by eye movement index. In summary, both sentence context and L2 proficiency can modulate bilingual lexical access. The early process is non-selective and bilinguals with more L2 proficiency could make use of sentence context in the early process than less L2 proficiency when reading L2 sentences.