Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Yuliya Leshchenko
Results: All the associations received from our participants were grouped into two categories
according to their language encoding: the within-language and the between-language reactions.
The fi rst group includes cases when an English stimulus evokes a reaction in Russian (girl →
девушка, old → молодой, street → машина); the second one is the case when an English
word stimulates a reaction also in English (girl → beautiful, old → young, street → car). The
proportion of between- and within-language reactions at the four stages of Experiment 1 is
represented in Figure 1.
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80
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40
20
0
302
1a 1b 1c 1d
Between-language
Within-language
Figure 1. Between-language and within-language reactions (in percentages): Experiment 1
Our data demonstrate a signifi cant discrepancy in the intensity of between- and withinlanguage
links in the student’s mental lexicon. The lexicon structure at the beginning stage of
acquiring English as a foreign language (Experiment 1a) is characterized by the overwhelming
majority (99,5%) of between-language links: L2 stimuli activate predominantly L1 lexical items
related to the former semantically or otherwise. Further on the number of within-language
reactions gradually increases; undoubtedly the progress in studies is followed by withinlanguage
links’ strengthening (in Experiment 1d they are activated in 14,1% of cases, compared
to 0,5% in Experiment 1a). Nevertheless the “language-specifi c” activation directed from the L2
to the L1 lexical system undoubtedly prevails over the whole period of studies.
The analysis of within-language reactions reveals that the changes occurring are not only
quantitative (the augmentation of their number) but also qualitative (their type change). Thus
at the fi rst stage of our experiment (Experiment 1a) an L2 word is most often processed by
the participants on the surface level of the mental lexicon, and the so-called “formal”
associations are produced (son → sun, polite → police, place → face, think → pink). In this
case the phonological/graphic characteristics of the stimulus turn to be its most striking
features and, as a result, a similar pronounced/written word is produced. The extent of the
phonological/graphic overlap can be different: from some letters/phonemes, common for both
words (answer → were, suppose → position) up to their maximum overlap, when only one
Multilingualism.indb 302 4-12-2006 12:28:15