Abstract
This study investigated the effect of non-task language in a language switching experiment. Non-task language refers to participants’ languages (regardless of proficiency level) that are not used in any trials throughout the experiment. We recruited 60 Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals (12th-grade high school students with a median age of 17) to perform a lexical decision (word vs. non-word) task in only two of their languages. We repeated the experiment three times to present each language pair once. In each experiment, the participants were divided into two groups that significantly contrasted with each other in their non-task language while remaining comparable in the two task languages. Response time (RT) and error rate (ER) have been examined to evaluate task performance. The interaction between task performance and the participants’ proficiency in the non-task language was also examined. The results showed anull effect of language switching. In addition, the effect of the non-task language was not found. These results were interpreted with reference to the main models of bilingual visual word recognition and the role of orthography specificity.
Highlights
In this study, we investigated how Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals process their languages in terms of the word recognition process
The bilingual interactive activation (BIA) + model and its successors claim that when an input letter strings/characters are presented to bilinguals, orthographic representations that are similar to the input word regardless of language membership are activated (Grainger and Dijkstra, 1992; Dijkstra and van Heuven, 1998, 2002; van Kesteren et al, 2012)
For languages that feature a certain level of correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, the lexical decision process may be implemented by mapping the orthographic input onto the existing mental lexicon via both semantic and phonological routes
Summary
We investigated how Tibetan-Chinese-English trilinguals process their languages in terms of the word recognition process. We have attempted to incorporate the processing of the non-task language and the role of orthography specificity in the existing models of bilingual word recognition, i.e., BIA+ (Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2002) and its modification BIA + s Casaponsa et al, 2019). Effects of the Non-task Language for in the domain of language production (Dijkstra et al, 1999; von Studnitz and Green, 2002). The lexical selection mechanism for production is sensitive to the target word and sensitive to the activation level of other non-target—but activated—words. Some studies have extended this non-selective hypothesis in bilingual studies to trilinguals (Lemhöfer et al, 2004; Szubko-Sitarek, 2011; Kroll et al, 2013), demonstrating that when trilinguals perform a task in one language, and the other two languages are activated
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