모국어와 외국어 단어 산출의 의미처리 과정

Semantic Processing in Korean and English Word Production

Previous studies on the bilinguals' lexical selection have suggested some evidence in favor of language-specific hypothesis. The purpose of this study was to see whether Korean-English bilinguals' semantic systems of Korean and English are shared or separated between the two languages. In a series of picture-word interference tasks, participants were to name the pictures in Korean or in English with distractor words printed either in Korean or English. The distractor words were either semantically identical, related, unrelated to the picture, or nonexistant. The response time of naming was facilitated when distractor words were semantically identical for both same-(Naming pictures in English/korean with English/Korean distractor words) and different-language pairs(Naming pictures in English with Korean distractor words and vice versa). But this facilitation effect was stronger when naming was produced in their native language, which in this case was Korean. Also, inhibitory effect was shown when the picture and its distractor word were semantically related in both same- and different-language paired conditions. These results show that bilinguals'two lexicons compete to some extent when selecting the target word. In this viewpoint, it can be concluded that the lexicons of either languages may not be entirely but partly overlapping in bilinguals.