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The Development of Bilingual Memory: Evidence from Word Translation by Trilinguals
Author(s) -
Groot Annette M. B.,
Hoeks John C. J.
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
language learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.882
H-Index - 103
eISSN - 1467-9922
pISSN - 0023-8333
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1995.tb00458.x
Subject(s) - concreteness , linguistics , mediation , psychology , foreign language , first language , multilingualism , cognitive psychology , sociology , social science , philosophy
We investigated the relation between foreign‐language proficiency and multilingual lexicosemantic organization, using two sets of 48 unbalanced Dutch‐English‐French trilingual adults as participants. Dutch was the participants' native language. Of their two foreign languages English was the strongest. We tested a developmental hypothesis that assumes a “word‐association” lexical structure for the native language and a relatively weak foreign language, here French, but a “concept‐mediation” structure for the native language and a stronger foreign language, here English. Support for the hypothesis derived from the participants' performance in two versions of the word‐translation task: “translation production” and “translation recognition”. Translation was from Dutch to both of the foreign languages. The critical experimental manipulation was word concreteness. We hypothesized that a concept‐mediation structure would predict an effect of this manipulation, whereas a word‐association organization would not. In accordance with the developmental hypothesis, a clear concreteness effect obtained in Dutch to English translation, but not in Dutch to French translation. Overall, the data suggest that foreign‐language proficiency indeed determines multilingual lexicosemantic organization.