Williams Joshua T, Newman Sharlene D
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
Program in Cognitive Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2017 Feb;46(1):211-225. doi: 10.1007/s10936-016-9432-4.
A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel language activation in M2L2 learners of sign language and to characterize the influence of spoken language and sign language neighborhood density on the activation of ASL signs. A priming paradigm was used in which the neighbors of the sign target were activated with a spoken English word and compared the activation of the targets in sparse and dense neighborhoods. Neighborhood density effects in auditory primed lexical decision task were then compared to previous reports of native deaf signers who were only processing sign language. Results indicated reversed neighborhood density effects in M2L2 learners relative to those in deaf signers such that there were inhibitory effects of handshape density and facilitatory effects of location density. Additionally, increased inhibition for signs in dense handshape neighborhoods was greater for high proficiency L2 learners. These findings support recent models of the hearing bimodal bilingual lexicon, which posit lateral links between spoken language and sign language lexical representations.
大量文献描述了单峰单语和双语词汇表，以及邻域密度如何影响词汇通达；然而，将这些发现推广到使用手语的双峰（M2）第二语言（L2）学习者的研究相对较少。本研究的目的是调查手语M2L2学习者的平行语言激活情况，并描述口语和手语邻域密度对美国手语（ASL）手语激活的影响。使用了一种启动范式，其中用一个英语口语单词激活手语目标的邻域，并比较稀疏和密集邻域中目标的激活情况。然后将听觉启动词汇判定任务中的邻域密度效应与之前仅处理手语的先天失聪手语者的报告进行比较。结果表明，与失聪手语者相比，M2L2学习者的邻域密度效应相反，即手型密度有抑制作用，位置密度有促进作用。此外，对于高水平L2学习者来说，密集手型邻域中对手语的抑制增加更大。这些发现支持了最近关于听力双峰双语词汇表的模型，该模型假定口语和手语词汇表征之间存在横向联系。
