Unbalanced Bilinguals’ Asymmetric Associations Between L2 Words for Taxonomic Categories of Basic and Superordinate Levels

The revised hierarchical model seems different from the distributedconceptual feature model in predicting how unbalanced bilinguals would be aware ofsemantic relations between words for taxonomic categories of basic level (exemplarwords) and words for those of superordinate level (category names) in L2. We did aseries of four experiments to compare unbalanced bilinguals’ awareness of conceptualrelations between exemplar words and between exemplar words and category names in theirfirst (L1) and second language (L2). A priming task of semantic categorization wasadopted, and the participants were 72 college students, who began to learn L2 inclassroom settings at a late age and achieved an L2 proficiency between intermediate andadvanced levels. The reaction times indicated that the participants could automaticallyprocess not only the exemplar-word but also the category-name primes in L2. Activationsof semantic representations for the category names in L2 seemed to spread to those forthe exemplar words in L1 and L2, but activations of semantic presentations for theexemplar words in L2 spread only to those for the example words in L1 for theparticipants. It was concluded that unbalanced bilinguals appear to have developedasymmetric associations between category names and exemplar words in L2. The implicationis that L2 learners should learn L2 words mainly by means of using the language and nottaking rote memory of isolated words