조선어-중국어-영어 삼중언어자의 언어 연결 모형

An Experimental Examination of Cross-Language Connections in Korean-Mandarin-English Trilinguals

Korean-Chinese university students in Yanbian, China are mostly trilingual: Their first language (L1) is Korean, L2 is Mandarin, and L3 is English. They acquire L2 in elementary school and L3 in middle school through L2. L1 is spoken at home and local community while L2 is required in school and public settings. Using the long-term cross-language repetition priming paradigm, three experiments were conducted to study lexical representation and processing in Korean-Mandarin-English triliguals. Each experiment was composed of priming and test session. In priming session, participants judged whether a stimulus word on the screen was animate or inanimate. In test session, the same participants were asked to judge whether a stimulus letter or character string constituted a legitimate word or not. In Experiment 1, prior semantic access to Mandarin primes did not affect the lexical decision of Korean translation equivalents. In Experiment 2, English primes facilitated the recognition of Mandarin translation equivalents, but did not affect the lexical decision of Korean translation equivalents. In Experiment 3, Mandarin primes had no influence on the processing of English translation equivalents. The results suggest that L2 plays a powerful role in Korean trilinguals in Yanbian, reflecting the L2 dominant environment in the region, and that language proficiency and environment should be considered to understand lexical representation and processing of trilinguals. The implications for the learning and preservation of minority languages in multilingual environments were discussed.