The Mental Lexicon Features of the Hakka-Mandarin Dialect Bilingual

Abstract

The current study investigated the mental lexicon features of the Hakka-Mandarin dialect bilingual from two perspectives: the structural features of lexicons and the relations between lexicons. Experiment one used a semantic fluency task and complex-network analysis to observe the structural features of lexicons. Experiment two used a cross-language long-term repetition priming paradigm to explore the relations between lexicons, with three sub-experiments focusing on conceptual representation, lexical representation, and their relations, respectively. The results from experiment one showed that the dialect bilingual lexicons were small-world in nature, and the D2 (Mandarin) lexicon was better organized than the D1 (Hakka) lexicon. Experiment two found that D1 and D2 might have partially shared conceptual representations, separate lexical form representations, and partially shared lemma representations. Based on the findings, we tentatively proposed a two-layer activation model to simulate the lexicon features of dialect bilingual speakers.