THE ACCESSING MECHANISM OF THE LESS PROFICIENT CHINESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL''S CONCEPTUAL REPRESENTATION
非熟练中-英双语者的第二语言的语义通达机制

In order to explore how the lexical representation of the less proficient Chinese-English Bilinguals' second language accesses its conceptual representation, the cross-language primed lexical decision task was used Subjects were 63 university students in Beijing Normal University, China In the first experiment, the Chinese target words were primed by their English translations Significant priming effects were obtained In the second experiment, the relation between the Chinese targets and the English primes was semantic association No significant effect was found In the third experiment, the targets were the similar graphic characters of the primes' Chinese translations The results showed a significant inhibitory effect In the fourth experiment, the targets were the homophones of the primes' translations The results showed a significant priming effect The results suggested that the lexical representation of the second language could only access the conceptual representation via the corresponding lexical representation of its first language Our result supported the hierarchical model by Kroll(1994)