МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ
ФЕДЕРАЛЬНОЕ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОЕ АВТОНОМНОЕ
ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛЬНОЕ УЧРЕЖДЕНИЕ ВЫСШЕГО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ
«СЕВЕРО-КАВКАЗСКИЙ ФЕДЕРАЛЬНЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ»
O. G. Alyunina
LEXICAL ACCESS
IN THE MENTAL LEXICON
OF THIRD LANGUAGE LEARNERS
О. Г. Алюнина
ДОСТУП К ЛЕКСИЧЕСКОЙ
ИНФОРМАЦИИ В МЕНТАЛЬНОМ
ЛЕКСИКОНЕ ИЗУЧАЮЩИХ
ТРЕТИЙ ЯЗЫК
Ставрополь
2017
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УДК 81.232
ББК 81.2
А 59
Alyunina O. G.
Lexical access in the mental lexicon of third language
learners. – Stavropol: Publisher NCFU, 2017. – 111 p.
Алюнина О.Г.
А 59 Доступ к лексической информации в ментальном лексиконе
изучающих третий язык. – Ставрополь: Изд-во
СКФУ, 2017. – 111 с.
ISBN 978-5-9296-0895-7
Монография выполнена на английском языке на основе материалов
экспериментального исследования студентов, изучающих второй
иностранный язык, и посвящена психолингвистическим вопросам
когнитивной организации и функционирования ментального лексикона
искусственных мультилингвов.
Адресована преподавателям, студентам и аспирантам филологических
факультетов, изучающим проблемы языка, речи и многоязычия.
УДК
81.232
ББК 81.2
Рецензенты:
д-р филол. наук, профессор С. Н. Бредихин,
канд. филол. наук, доцент Е. А. Луговая
(ГБОУ ВО «Ставропольский государственный
педагогический институт»)
ISBN 978-5-9296-0895-7
© ФГАОУ ВО «Северо-Кавказский
федеральный университет», 2017
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor
Heather Marsden, who had a very professional and effective way of
coaching me along the road of studying second language acquisition to
the completion of my MA dissertation.
I would also very much like to thank my other supervisor Professor
Dunstan Brown for providing me with numerous prompt and useful
suggestions for improving my research project.
I am very grateful to Professor Marilyn Vihman for giving me a
basis in bilingual language development.
I owe a lot to Professor Peter Sells, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Bernadette
Plunkett, Márton Sóskuthy for sharing their linguistic research
experience. I give my thanks to all the staff of the Department of Language
and linguistic Science at the University of York, which was a
very pleasant environment for studies and professional development.
My special gratitude goes to the authorities of North Caucasian
Federal University for giving me an opportunity to get top-rate postgraduate
training at the University of York and assistance in conducting
my experiments.
I would like to thank also all my NCFU students, who kindly
agreed to take part in the experiment, and my family, friends, colleagues
and students for their patience, prayers, and other support.
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ABSTRACT
Research on bilingual word processing suggests that lexical access
is nonselective with respect to language, in other words, that word representations
of their both languages become active during word recognition.
The present study was aimed at testing whether the nonselective
access hypothesis holds for trilinguals and three languages and revealing
the role the second language proficiency plays in the third language
acquisition. Thirty-three Russian university students learning German
as a third language who had started learning English (L2) as a foreign
language at secondary school were asked to perform a translation
recognition task from Russian (L1) into German (L3).
The word materials included Russian-German, English-German,
Russian-English-German cognates, and noncognates. The participants
were divided into two groups depending on the level of their proficiency
in L2 English, which was determined based on academic records and
language history questionnaires. As expected, both groups of participants
demonstrated faster RTs and higher accuracies for cognates than
for noncognates, additionally; Russian-English-German cognates were
processed even more quickly than Russian-German and EnglishGerman
cognates were. These findings are consistent with the view of
language nonselective access implying all languages of a multilingual
may affect word activation and recognition. The experiment did not
reveal significant differences in RTs and error rates between the two L2
proficiency groups.
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INTRODUCTION
The third language (L3) acquisition is a relatively young discipline
in the field of psycholinguistic research. However, growing studies on
the topic evidence differences between second and third language acquisition
and postulate peculiar characteristics of a third language learning
processes. Scholars claim that second language (L2) acquisition
needs to be distinguished from third language acquisition (L3). Herdina
and Jessner (2002) argue that multilingualism not only produces a
qualitative shift, but it leads to a substantial change of quality in the
speaker’s language system(s). Following Grosjean, who postulates that
“a bilingual is NOT the sum of two complete or incomplete
monolinguals; rather he or she has a unique and specific linguistic
configuration” (1992, p. 55), it can be claimed that a multilingual is
neither the sum of three or more monolinguals, nor a bilingual with an
additional language. Apparently, the presence of two or more prior languages
may cause more complex interaction between the multilingual’s
languages than pure bilingualism does. In the case of bilingualism, a
cross-linguistic influence on a target language can only be due to the
one non-target language present, while in trilingualism or
multilingualism any of the non-target languages, or more than one of
them at the same time, may cause the cross-linguistic influence.
The researchers determined the number of factors affecting the acquisition
of a third and additional languages. The most crucial of them
are the cross-linguistic influence between languages, and the language
proficiency in each of the languages involved, the order of acquisition,
the learners’ age and the degree of language awareness (Cenoz and
Genesee, 1998; Cenoz, 2001; Grosjean, 2001, Jarvis and Pavlenko,
2008; Kellerman, 1995; Szubko-Sitarek, 2012). Studies on
L3acquisition and use have also shown that L2 plays a particular role in
a trilingual system. Third language learners do not rely on their mother
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CONTENTS
Introduction ……………………………………………………… 5
1. From Bilingualism to Multilingualism ……………………….
1.1. Introduction ……………………………………………………
1.2. The Problems of the Multilingual World ……………………..
1.3. Terminology and Definitions of Multilingualism ……………..
1.4. Research Fields in the Study of Multilingualism ……………...
1.5. General Characteristics of Multilingual Learners …………….
1.6. Cross-linguistic Influence in Third Language Acquisition …..
1.7. Conclusion …………………………………………………….
2. Mental Lexicon …………………………………………………
2.1. Introduction ……………………………………………………
2.2. Definition of the Mental Lexicon ……………………………..
2.3. The Structure of the Mental Lexicon and Views on Lexical
Storage ……………………………………………………………….
2.4. Models of Lexical Access in the Mental Lexicon ……………..
2.5. Views on Language Processing ……………………………….
2.6. Conclusion …………………………………………………….
3. Studies of Multilingual Representation and Processing …….
3.1. Introduction ……………………………………………………
3.2. Models of Multilingual lexical Storage and Access Processing …..
3.3. Language Activation in Multilinguals ………………………..
3.4. Stimuli Used in Visual Word Recognition Research ………….
3.5. Cognate Facilitation Effect in Multilingual Lexical Processing ……
3.6. Conclusion ……………………………………………………
4. Experimental Study of the Lexical Access in the Mental
Lexicon of Russian Third Language Learners …………………...
4.1. Introduction ……………………………………………………
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4.2. Research Questions and Hypotheses ………………………….
4.3. Research Design ………………………………………………
4.4. Results …………………………………………………………
4.5. Discussion ……………………………………………………..
Conclusion …………………………………………………………
Appendix ………………………………………………………….
References ………………………………………………………..
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