抄録
With Korean-Chinese-English trilinguals living in north-east China as participants, three repetition priming experiments were conducted to investigate multilinguals' lexical representation and processing. In three experiments, primes were presented masked or visible. Participants were requested to perform the lexical decision task. Significant intra- and inter-language priming effects were obtained and found to be modulated by the proficiency of each language of the trilinguals. However, some of the findings were not fit with the predictions from major models of bilingualism. The predominant role of L2 revealed in this study poses a problem to the existing models of bilingualism which have given a superior role to L1. To explain the dominating effects of L2 in the triliguals, we propose that the status of L1 could be adjusted as a consequence of inter-language interactions.
