Senior Chinese high school students' awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations in L1 and L2

Abstract

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations that senior Chinese high school students had in L2 differed from the pattern they had in their first language (L1). The results consistently indicated that (i) the participants appeared as aware of taxonomic relations in L2 as they were in L1; and (ii) they were more readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L1 but less readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L2. It was concluded that with taxonomic relations, low-proficiency bilinguals could have a common set of conceptual representations for both L2 and L1, as they are assumed in the revised hierarchical model (RHM) to have. With thematic associations, they might have more difficulty gaining access to their representations in L2 than they might have in L1.

Taxonomic and thematic semantic systems.

“…A study of Chinese high school students found that bilingual participants made more thematically-related responses than taxonomically-related responses in their first language, but equally frequent thematic and taxonomic responses in their second language (Li, Zhang, & Wang, 2011). This study also found that bilingual participants were equally accurate at taxonomic and thematic explicit semantic relatedness judgments when the items were presented as pictures or as words in their first language, but were less accurate at recognizing thematic relations when they were presented as words in their second language.…”

The construct of language proficiency in the study of bilingualism from a cognitive perspective

“…If the test taker produces only one of these two words in language B, how do we know whether he or she also knows the other word? In sum, languages differ in the size and density of their word nets and it is thus difficult to assess knowledge of size and density in two languages in an equivalent way (see Li, Zhang & Wang, 2011, for a recent attempt). 4 3 Pienemann, Keßler and Itani-Adams (2011) offer what might be seen as a partial solution to the cross-linguistic comparison of morpho-syntactic control of two languages, based on Pienemann's (2005) Processability Theory, which distinguishes four processing procedures, observed in developmental trajectories in L2 learners of typologically different languages.…”

Episodic Specificity in Acquiring Thematic Knowledge of Novel Words from Descriptive Episodes

“…This result suggests that the thematic clustering facilitated the acquisition of new words. However, other researchers found that bilingual adolescents had difficulty in accessing the thematic relations between words in their second language, and claimed that the thematic relations are hard to obtain in reading (Li et al, 2011). The present study further examined whether learners could easily acquire thematic knowledge of newly learned words from language context.…”