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Testing the Revised Hierarchical Model: Evidence from word associations*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2014

JON CLENTON
JON CLENTON*
Affiliation:
University of Reading
*
Address for correspondence: Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics, Whiteknights, PO Box 218, Reading RG6 6AA, UKj.clenton@reading.ac.uk
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Abstract

The main purpose of the work described in this paper is to examine the extent to which the L2 developmental changes predicted by Kroll and Stewart's (1994) Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) can be understood by word association response behaviour. The RHM attempts to account for the relative “strength of the links between words and concepts in each of the bilingual's languages” (Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz & Green, 2010, p. 373). It proposes that bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency tend to rely less on mediation, while less proficient L2 learners tend to rely on mediation and access L2 words by translating from L1 equivalents. In this paper, I present findings from a simple word association task. More proficient learners provided a greater proportion of collocational links, suggesting that they mediate less when compared to less proficient learners. The results provide tentative support for Kroll and Stewart's model.

Keywords

Revised Hierarchical Modelword associationsbilingualismmediation
Type
Research Note
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , January 2015 , pp. 118 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am extremely grateful to Tess Fitzpatrick, Judith Kroll, Jeanine Treffers-Daller, and to the three anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the staff and students of the Graduate School of Language and Culture, Osaka University, for participating in the studies presented in this paper.

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