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Acquisition of Abstract Words in the Mandarin and English Bilinguals’ Mental Lexicon

In English

Författare

  • Yu Huang

Summary, in English

Models of the bilingual mental lexicon, such as the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) and the Modified Hierarchical Model (MHM), suggest an asymmetrical pattern in the mental lexicons among bilinguals between two languages, and the representations are multi-dimensional. This study sets out to understand how bilinguals process the mental lexicon of two languages for abstract words and corresponding concepts in their mind, including questions such as the kind of obstacles bilinguals will encounter when learning abstract words in the foreign language learning context, the typical challenge that abstract words are presumed to be more difficult to grasp, and the following consequence brought by learning another language. Twenty Mandarin L1 and English L2 bilinguals took part in the experiment using the Property Generation Task and Translation Task to address these questions. In particular, the differences in conceptual representation between intermediate and advanced learners of English were investigated. Results indicate that participants’ processing of abstract words is multi-level, using modalities such as sensorimotor and amodal verbal association. The perceived degree of abstractness is largely determined by how much content they can associate with the words. Proficiency and familiarity with the items are major contributors to translation outcomes and there is distinction between semantic and conceptual levels of representation in the mental lexicon. The results corroborate the MHM model, which better accounts for the dynamic and subjective difficulties of the mental lexicon posed by language-specific categories. So far, evidence of crosslinguistic influence (CFI) is only found among individual cases, and an individual’s social and language experience, as well as knowledge play an important role in forming the conceptual representations of abstract words.

Avdelning/ar

  • Master's Programme: Language and Linguistics
  • Engelska

Publiceringsår

2024

Språk

Engelska

Dokumenttyp

Examensarbete för masterexamen (Två år)

Ämne

  • Languages and Literatures

Nyckelord

  • bilingualism
  • language acquisition
  • crosslinguistic influence
  • mental lexicon
  • codability
  • abstract words

Handledare

  • Panos Athanasopoulos