Bilingual Lexicon

With the increase amount of bilingual worldwide, psycholinguists began to look at how two languages are represented in our brain. Mental Lexicon is one of the places that researchers focused on to see how that is different between bilingual and monolingual.

Researched during past decades did show bilingual brain have special cortex connections.[1] And how that represents different structure of the brain for bilingual is still under studying. There are also some debates over the basic mode of the lexical represent of bilingual.

Development

Lexical development

In our childhood, learning words is one of the most important missions we need to accomplish. And we did it from interactions with our parents and the environment around us. Lexical development does not occur in isolation.[2] We learn pronunciations, meanings and how to use of words from interaction with our parents and environment, which is social interactions. The process moves from using word in particular situation to the understanding that words can be used to refer to different instances of conceptual categories, which means objects, or action words can be used in similar situations.[3] After this step children increases their vocabulary in categories like color, animal, or food. And also be able to add prefix and suffix to and meaning to words.[2] Once enter the school, we develop words into reading and written aspect. Knowledge will be developed by reading and exposure to various written context.[4]

Lexical development in bilingual

For bilingual children who grow up in a bilingual environment, how their language developed through childhood and what are the factors influence the lexical size of both languages. Researches showed that, the basic developed process is same with monolingual, where bilingual children tend to learn the languages as two monolinguals. The growth of both languages’ lexicon is the same with the growth of the lexicon for monolingual.[2] Older children do transfer more than younger children. Also in this step of learning word, the vocabulary size positively related to the exposure time in that language.[2] And this will stop until a certain amount of vocabulary of the language is reached.[5] Semantic tasks for preschool children with predominately Spanish-speaking, predominantly English-speaking and bilingual showed, these three groups are different from each other. Bilingual perform best on expressive function for both Spanish and English as predominately speaking children, but performed differently in each of the language, which means they do not mirror performance in Spanish and English. They are better on some in English, better on other some in Spanish.[6] One more thing needs to mention is that the ability of learning one language does not influence the ability of learning the other one for bilinguals.[5]

Once we learn our second language later in the life, the development of that is kind of different from children that grow up in a bilingual environment. In this situation, we learn our second language when our first language is already developed. Then the beginning step of learning words in second language is translation. Or we can say the definitions. This is totally different from how we learned our first language which I input all the information of semantic and formal entities together.[7] When access to these new learned words, the basic language semantic system will be activated. Which means when a second language word is activated, the same meaning basic language word is also activated. It can be said that, learners are still thinking in basic language, but tried to represent in second language by translation. As more semantic and symax knowledge is learned for second language. This new language is gradually independent from the basic language. Learners began to access the language without translation, with semantic knowledge for that language. As more and more exposure to the new language, learner will complete the development of second language when they can access and use the language from the concept, which can be say thinking in that language directly.[2]

Process and access

With years of researches, how languages are stored and processed by bilinguals is still a main theme that many psycholinguists studying on. One main topic is that bilinguals possess one or two internal lexicons, and even more with three stores. One for each language and the third one is for corresponding two languages.[5] Reaction time of recognizing words in different languages is the most used method to figure out how our lexicon been activated. Researches in 1980s by Soares and Grosjean on English-Portuguese bilingual had two main findings. One is that although bilingual can access real words in English as quickly as English monolingual, but they are slower at responding to non-words.[5] The other finding is that, bilingual took longer to access code-switched words than they did base-language words in the monolingual mode. These two findings can be seen as the evidence for more than one lexicon are existed in bilinguals' brains. As technology develops, Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is also used to study how brain activity is different in bilinguals' brain when both language are interact. Imaging studies have yielded that specific brain areas are involved in bilingual switching, which means this part of the brain can be said as the "third lexicon", the interconnected part of two lexicons for each language, where stores the guest words. Also other researches suggested only one combined lexicon is exists.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Kim, K. S., & Relkin, N. R. (1997). "Distinct cortical areas associated with native and second languages". Nature, 388(6638), 171.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Goldstein, B. (2004). Bilingual language development and disorders in Spanish-English speakers. Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes Pub..
  3. ↑ Nelson, K. (1985). Making sense: The acquisition of shared meaning. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
  4. ↑ Stahl, S. (1999). Vocabulary development. Cambridge, MA: Brookline.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Muysken, P.; Milroy, L. (1995). One speaker, two languages: cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.
  6. ↑ Pena, E., Bedore, L.M., & Rappazzo, C. (2003). "Comparison of Spanish, English, and bilingual Children's performance across semantic tasks". Language, Speech & Hearing Services in the School, 34, 5–16.
  7. ↑ Jiang, Nan (2000). "Lexical Representation and Development in a Second Language". Applied Linguistics. 21 (1): 47–77. doi:10.1093/applin/21.1.47.
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