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Senior Chinese high school students' awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations in L1 and L2*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2010

DEGAO LI ,
XIANNV ZHANG  and
GUOYING WANG
DEGAO LI*
Affiliation:
School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
XIANNV ZHANG
Affiliation:
Chengfeng Middle School, Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, China
GUOYING WANG
Affiliation:
Department of Chinese, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
*
Address for correspondence: Degao Li, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, 388#, Yuhangtang Rd., Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, Chinali-degao@163.com
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Abstract

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations that senior Chinese high school students had in L2 differed from the pattern they had in their first language (L1). The results consistently indicated that (i) the participants appeared as aware of taxonomic relations in L2 as they were in L1; and (ii) they were more readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L1 but less readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L2. It was concluded that with taxonomic relations, low-proficiency bilinguals could have a common set of conceptual representations for both L2 and L1, as they are assumed in the revised hierarchical model (RHM) to have. With thematic associations, they might have more difficulty gaining access to their representations in L2 than they might have in L1.

Keywords

low-proficiency bilingualsrelative awarenessthematic associationstaxonomic relations
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 444 - 457
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

The authors wish to express their sincere gratitude to the four reviewers for their constructive comments.

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