Chen Jianlin, Liu Hong
Department of English, School of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2020 Apr 30;11:754. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00754. eCollection 2020.
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.
本研究在语言转换实验中考察了非任务语言的影响。非任务语言是指参与者的语言（无论熟练程度如何），在整个实验的任何试验中都未被使用。我们招募了60名藏 - 汉 - 英三语者（高二年级学生，中位年龄为17岁），让他们仅用其中两种语言执行词汇判断（单词与非单词）任务。我们将实验重复了三次，以使每对语言都出现一次。在每次实验中，参与者被分为两组，这两组在非任务语言方面有显著差异，而在两种任务语言方面保持可比。我们检查了反应时间（RT）和错误率（ER）以评估任务表现。还考察了任务表现与参与者在非任务语言方面的熟练程度之间的相互作用。结果显示语言转换没有效果。此外，未发现非任务语言的影响。这些结果参照双语视觉单词识别的主要模型以及正字法特异性的作用进行了解释。
