Abstract:

The revised hierarchical model (RHM) states that bilinguals could access common semantic memory in different languages. To investigate whether first year non-English majors could have the same pattern of awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations in different languages, two experiments were conducted. Consistent with the prediction of RHM, the participants’ performance was relatively poorer for the stimuli presented in English than in Chinese in both the task of memory and free recall and the task of forced-choice decision making. Inconsistent with RHM, however, they had a similar strength of awareness of thematic associations to that of taxonomic relations when the stimuli were presented in Chinese, which is in agreement with Lin and Murphy (2001), but their awareness of taxonomic relations was significantly stronger than that of thematic associations when the stimuli were presented in English. It was concluded that the common semantic memory in RHM could only refer to the universal knowledge representations such as those of taxonomic relations but not those of thematic associations, at least for low-proficiency bilinguals.