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Conceptual Representations in the Multilingual Mind Wander Lowie, Marjolijn Verspoor & Bregtje Seton Conceptual Representations in the Multilingual Mind Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 2008 Paper No. 723 Universität Duisburg-Essen Wander Lowie, Marjolijn Verspoor & Bregtje Seton University of Groningen (The Netherlands) Conceptual Representations in the Multilingual Mind Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 2008 Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 723 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen Order LAUD-papers online: http://www.linse.uni-due.de/linse/laud/index.html Or contact: [email protected] Wander Lowie, Marjolijn Verspoor & Bregtje Seton Conceptual Representations in the Multilingual Mind Introduction What is a word and what is a concept? How is a word related to its concept(s)? Actual conceptual representation is difficult to grasp, but we will assume, that a concept emerges from the physical, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, and linguistic experience an individual has with a particular lexical item, phrase or construction, resulting in associations of varying strength. As Langacker (2000) suggests in his Usage-Based model, these associations are part of “massive networks in which structures with varying degrees of entrenchment, and representing different levels of abstraction, are linked together in relationships of categorization, composition, and symbolization” (p.5). Associations can then be numerous and change over time, causing it to be a dynamic network. Because associations are the result of personal experience, they do not only change over time, but they also differ among different individuals within a speech community. Nonetheless, because of their interaction and therefore their mutual experience, people may negotiate and exchange commonalities in their conceptual representations. Sharifian (2008) proposes culture-dependent conceptualisation, thereby accounting for conceptual differences between different cultural groups. He calls this conceptualistation “heterogeneously distributed cultural cognition” (p. 6), meaning that the conceptual representation of two individuals belonging to the same cultural group will partly overlap and partly differ. It is to be expected that different languages therefore bring along different representations of certain concepts as well. The present study is concerned with how the ‘cultural cognition’ of one language influences native speakers of this language when they are speaking their second language. Being interested in the conceptual representation of bilingual speakers, we investigated the differences in conceptual representation between advanced learners of English (Dutch third- year students) and native speakers of English. To come to this, we used word association tests to compare conceptual representation in both English and Dutch. These different word associations were used as primes to their targets in a priming experiment, in which a lexical decision task was used to gather reaction times to the target words. With this experiment, we wanted to put conceptual representation in a multilingual perspective and find out whether people’s first language conceptual representation influences their conceptual representation in another language, even when being an advanced speaker of this language. One of the questions in recent studies investigating the multilingual mental lexicon is to what extent conceptual representations can be considered language specific. From a developmental point of view the question can be asked if L2 learners can attain L2 concepts 1 that are identical to the concepts of native speakers. Many studies have investigated this question using translation studies and cross-language priming tasks. In these studies the question is if the words in the L2 mental lexicon are “conceptually mediated” or if they can only be accessed through the L1 lexicon. For instance, a major conclusion of the translation studies carried out by Judith Kroll and her associates is that translation from L1 to L2 is not identical to translation from L2 to L1, which is referred to as “translation asymmetry”. Other studies report that “when translating words in either direction, bilinguals of various L2 fluency levels apparently access and exploit conceptual memory representations at least most of the time” (de Groot & Poot, 1997: 252). The starting point of this discussion is always that conceptual representations are language independent and that the language specific lexical semantic information has to be matched with the conceptual representations. From a usage-based perspective, though, one would argue that conceptual representations are not language specific but specific to each individual and through a bottom-up process (interaction among individuals), they become somewhat more specific to a speech community. Taking the usage-based approach one would expect that the concept developed in the L1 will always play some role in the L2 because no matter how much one has used the L2, one cannot completely erase all previous experience and associations and it would be difficult to develop a conceptual representation similar to one by a native speaker of the target language. However, how do you ascertain to what extent an L2 concept has been acquired? Thus far, the overlap of conceptual representations has been expressed in the percentage of overlap between within-language and between-language word associations(Kolers, 1963; Taylor, 1976). In addition to the objections against using a translation task for word associations (see Van Hell & de Groot (1998)) this purely quantitative approach can only roughly indicate a measure of conceptual overlap, and does not give any insight in the actual conceptual representation in multilingual speakers. We will claim that even for seemingly very strongly overlapping meanings of words in two different languages, like concrete cognates, there may be differences in semantic interpretation. In other words, an English rose is not necessarily the same as a Dutch roos. We will refer to converging evidence from two areas of research, word association studies from cognitive linguistics and reaction time experiments from psycholinguistic research to point to the many fine grained differences between seemingly equivalent words in different languages and to gain insight into the organization of the conceptual representations of bilinguals. A Usage-Based and Dynamic Approach to the Mental Lexicon Most, if not all current models of the multilingual mental lexicon assume an interactive activation network of lexical items. Rather than assuming separate lexical representations for words in different languages, it has now been convincingly demonstrated that the 2 lexicon must be seen as one network, regardless of language or register. At the same time, most models assume some kind of “language tag” that is associated with each item in the lexicon. In this way, the recognition of a word in one language may inhibit lexical items from other language subsets (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998; Dijkstra &Heuven van, 2002). The mechanism that is assumed to account for lexical selection is activation. Each lexical item has its own level of activation that increases with use and that decreases over time. As the lexicon is considered a network, the activation of one lexical item can lead to increased activation levels of lexical items that are closely associated with that item. Lexical items that are associated with one particular language can thus be assumed to interactively activate each other, allowing for faster recognition of words from that lexical subset. Subsets of lexical items are not limited to words that belong to the same language. Similar mechanisms can be assumed for any characteristic that words share, like register or conceptual overlap. In this way, a multidimensional picture of the mental lexicon emerges in which each lexical item can simultaneously be part of an infinite number of subsets. The activation metaphor allows for a flexible interpretation of the subsets. Even though in principle lexical items from a particular language subset will be activated in a language specific situation, like speech production, individual lexical items may be activated that share other characteristics and that happen to have a very high level of activation due to recency or frequency of use. This accounts for the observation that while speaking one language, lexical items from other language subsets may be predominant. As argued for the BIA and BIA+ model (Dijkstra et al., 2002), another principle of lexical selection is competition. The selection of one lexical item will suppress the activation level of competing words in the BIA model: “activated language nodes send inhibitory feedback to all word nodes in the other language” (Dijkstra et al., 2002: 176). In BIA+, the role of the language node is moderated and it may even be argued, as has been done by Jacquet and French (2002), that it is redundant. If all lexical items contain information about the language to which they belong, it is unnecessary to assume a separate language node if the starting point is a distributed rather than a modular model of lexical processing. Having said that, a language node may be required to control language specific production processes (Kroll & Dijkstra, 2002). Although the BIA+ model has shown to be able to account for a wide variety of research results, especially on visual recognition, increased explanatory power can be expected
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