Literature Review on Bilingual Mental Lexicon

1.Introduction

Internal lexicon is the storage of lexical information in memory, which in structure includes concept and lexical representation, refers to the psychological representation of vocabulary, involving the information about the pronunciations, spellings and meanings of the words. The study of bilingual mental lexicon has now been a major concern in second language acquisition and psycholinguistic research. This paper provides a review of theories concerning bilingual mental lexicon.

2.The Earliest Research: Weinreich

Weinreich (1953) sketched three possible organizations of word knowledge in a bilingual mental lexicon: compound, coordinate and subordinate. When we change Weinreich’s English and Russian target into English and Chinese one, we will find that the models are divided into two layers: the underlying layer demonstrates concept system; the upper layer represents pronunciation system of the two language, which is apparently independent. The coordinate model shows that the concept systems of two language are separate, the compound model means that the concept system is shared by two language, then the subordinate model represents that the lexical meaning of L2 can be achieved by the translation equivalents of L1.

3.Other models of bilingual mental lexicon representation

After analyzing Weinreich’s researches, the following kinds of the models of bilingual mental lexicon representation have been put forward.

3.1Simultaneous storage model & Independent storage model

Simultaneous storage model holds that the forms of two languages is linked with the semantic representation, the semantic information is simultaneously stored in one system; while the link between the two languages is not only on the conceptual system but also on form system.

Independent storage model holds that binlingual words have separate conceptual representation system.

3.2Word association model & Concept mediation model

Word association model proposed that the second language makes contact with the first language at the lexical level by way of cross-language word association. Access to concepts from L2 words is therefore mediated through the first language by activation of translation equivalents in L1. In contrast, the concept mediation model proposes that each language has independent access to a common concept representation. The findings of Potter and her colleagues supported the concept mediation model. Later, Kroll and Curley(1988) questioned the finding that all second language speakers are concept mediators regardless of their expertise.

3.3 The mixed model & The asymmetrical model

The mixed model holds that two languages can be directly linked on the word layer, so does on the conceptual layer. In the mixed model, the link strength among different nodes or differentdirectional link strength between the same pair of nodes is different, which will lead to the asymmetrical model. Thus it can be seen that the asymmetrical model is a special case of the mixed model. The researches on the mixed model is little, those on the asymmetrical model is too much.