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

L2 Lexical Activation in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon: An Experimental Study
phoneme/letter difference in the stimulus → reaction pair exists (work → word, red → read,
son → soon). Along with the increase in the L2 profi ciency and, therefore, with the expansion
of the vocabulary, the access to the deep-laid semantic level of the lexicon occurs and the
so-called “semantic” reactions begin to appear much more frequently. These associations
reproduce combinatory patterns of the English language, such as “action → its object” (read →
book, translate → word, open → door) and “quality → object” (happy → child, large → family,
beautiful → girl).
The proportion of the “formal” and “semantic” reactions at the four stages of Experiment
1 is summarized in Table 1.
Experiment 1a Experiment 1b Experiment 1c Experiment 1d
Formal 77,3 62,1 27,6 19,2
Semantic 22,7 37,9 72,4 80,8
Table 1. “Formal” and “semantic” reactions (in percentages): Experiment 1
So then the results of Experiment 1 demonstrate the predominance of the between-language
activation during the whole period of the L2 acquisition examined. At the same time a steady
increase of within-language activation cases allows us to suppose that a further progress in
studies will be followed by a corresponding increase in within-language links’ intensity as well
as further changes and expansion of within-language associations’ types. We supposed that at
some level of the L2 profi ciency the within-language activation can, therefore, replace the
between-language one almost fully. In order to prove this assumption another experiment was
carried out. This time we aimed at discovering the mental lexicon structure of students with
a relatively good command of the English language, although the predominant one for them is
undoubtedly Russian.
Experiment 2
Participants: 52 students of the Perm Pedagogical University, the department of foreign
languages, aged from 17 to 26. All have been taught English before entering the University
and by the fi rst years of studying possess intermediate-level skills in oral and written English.
The course of studies lasts 5 years after which the students are expected to have mastered the
language well enough to become teachers of English at schools and universities. Although the
last year students are highly advanced in the four aspects of speech production and perception
(speaking, listening, reading and writing), their command of the English language is worse than
that of the native one, as the former is used much more seldom, mostly at the lessons and
rarely - in real communication. In general the 1 st — 3 rd year students are considered to have an
intermediate L2 profi ciency level, whereas the 4 th — 5 th year students are highly advanced.
Materials and Design: identical to the previous experiment with the only difference in trials’
quantity and the intervals between them. All in all fi ve experiments were conducted, each in
the middle of the academic year.
Multilingualism.indb 303 4-12-2006 12:28:15
303