Conceptual and Lexical Development in Second Language Acquisition

Translation Processes in Bilinguals: Role of Inter-Lingual Distance and Second Language Proficiency

“…In summary, the findings of the present research in Japanese-English bilingual groups are in line with those of Kroll andStewart (1994), De Groot, Dannenburg, andvan Hell (1994), Altarriba and Mathis (1997) and Chen et al (1997), in that they support the basic architecture of the asymmetrical hierarchical model of bilingual memory and indicate that the functional connections within the model change with increasing proficiency in the second language. The present experiment suggests that word recognition processes in Japanese-English bilingual groups could be described by a transition from the word association model to the asymmetrical hierarchical model.…”

“…Kawakami (1994), using the semantic priming paradigm, also found that more direct links are formed between lexical and conceptual representations of the language with increasing L2 proficiency. This view, however, contrasts with that of Altarriba and Mathis (1997), who have suggested, on the basis of their finding of a Stroop effect in both within-and between-language conditions in completely novice L2 learners, that even novice bilinguals form L2-conceptual links at the initial stage of learning a second language, though this conclusion needs to be tempered by the fact that L2 learning was limited to the highly concrete color names required for the Stroop task.…”

“…As outlined in the introduction, much of the research into the structure of bilingual representational systems has been based on languages belonging to the same IndoEuropean family (Altarriba & Mathis, 1997;Kroll & Stewart, 1994;Magiste, 1984). Relatively little is known about the bilingual cognitive system when the languages in question have very different historical roots, and as recently intimated by Chen et al (1997), extreme differences between languages may give rise to somewhat different processing patterns in the bilingual lexicon.…”

“…In general, much of the research on bilingual memory has been based on languages which have some similar characteristics. For instance, Kroll and Stewart (1994) used Dutch and English, Altarriba and Mathis (1997) used English and Spanish, and the study of Magiste (1984) was based on German and Swedish. These languages share not only a common alphabetic script but, because of their common Indo-European ancestry, share many cognates (words with similar phonological and orthographic structure in the two languages, e.g., the French "chat" and English "cat"), and there is evidence that cognates may be represented differently from non-cognates in the bilingual lexicon.…”

“…For instance, Chen and Ho (1986) used Chinese and English, languages which not only have different historical roots, Chinese belonging to the Sino-Tibetan group, English to the Indo-European group, but also employ different scripts (logographic and alphabetic, respectively), and this may account for the differences between their findings and those of, for example, Magiste (1984) and Altarriba and Mathis (1997). Chen and Ho (1986) suggested that extreme differences between languages make it easier to resist competing stimuli in the second language, reducing the inter-lingual Stroop interference effect.…”