Mehrsprachigkeit in Europa: Plurilinguismo in Europa ... - EURAC

Yuliya Leshchenko
Results: Alike with the previous experiment’s results, our participants produced both withinlanguage
and between-language associative reactions. Their proportion at the fi ve stages of the
experiment is presented in Figure 2.
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
304
2a 2b 2c 2d 2e
Between-language
Within-language
Figure 2. Between-language and within-language reactions (in percentages): Experiment 2
As was the case in Experiment 1, we can observe a steady growth of the within-language
associations along with the increase in the L2 profi ciency. Moreover, at the last stages of our
experiment (Experiments 2d and 2e) the intensity of within-language links begins to prevail over
the between-language ones (although this predominance is not signifi cant enough — it does not
exceed 10%). It appears, though, that this tendency begins to slacken by the fi nal stage of the
experiment: we can not observe a steady progress of one type of reactions with respect to the
other any more, both seem to be equalized and to be activated approximately parallel. The
general discrepancy between the ratios of the Russian and English reactions tends to decrease
gradually from one experiment stage to another until the gap between them becomes slight
enough. Although we certainly observe a marked shift from the “between-language” activation
to the “within-language” one, there is no indication as to the former being substituted or
replaced fully by the latter. Thus the “language-specifi c” hypothesis turned out to be incorrect;
more likely we deal with a case of “language-independent” activation: a situation when an
L2 stimulus is able to spread activation to both lexical systems known to the individual and,
therefore, to retrieve either an L1 or an L2 reaction with a relatively equal probability.
As for the within-language associations in particular, we observe that number of “formal”
reactions has reduced considerably, whereas the “semantic” reactions become much more
numerous and diverse (see Table 2).
Experiment 2a Experiment 2b Experiment 2c Experiment 2d Experiment 2e
Semantic 90,4 91,5 90,3 96,8 97,4
Formal 9,6 8,5 9,7 3,2 2,6
Table 2. “Formal” and “semantic” reactions (in percentages): Experiment 2
Multilingualism.indb 304 4-12-2006 12:28:16