Lexical Links across the Languages in Multilinguals: The study of Turkish Persian Bilinguals

Lexical connections across the languages are a well established fact. This research followed the ideology of Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) - a modelproposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994) - and investigated the architecture of a multilingual language representations regarding lexicon and semanticconnections across the languages and conceptual representation (CR) on Turkish-Persian early dominant with elementary bilinguals English knowledge.RHM not only shows the components of bilinguals‟ mind and explains their relationship but also predicts the language learner‟s behavior. Threeexperiments were conducted in 7 different tasks. The findings were partially consistent with RHM predictions. The results confirmed that the more dominanta language was, the stronger connections with conceptual representation and newly learned language would be. Unlike the predictions of this model, thisresearch supported the idea that each language is developed separately and newly learned language did not necessarily need the mediation of any dominantlanguage for its semantic processing even at elementary level. In line with Slinkier,(2001); Dewaele,(1998,2001) and Ecke,(2001), this research also confirmed that L3 has stronger connections with L2 rather than L1.

کلیدواژه ها:

Bilingualism ، multilingualism ، lexicon ، cross-linguistic influence ، priming