Record Detail

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to
the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user.
The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in J Mem Lang 33: 149–174, 1994) or
the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in J Mem Lang 51(1), 1–22, 2004) skillfully capture the
prediction regarding two languages, with the lexical level being separate and the conceptual
one being unified or distributed to a varying degree. In this set of experiments, we employed
primed animacy decision tasks to address the lexico-semantic representation of trilingual
German–English–French speakers. The comparison of reaction times has revealed priming
effects from L1 to L2 and from L2 to L1, both with prime duration of 100 and 50 ms; a priming
asymmetry effect between the L2 and L3 language directions; and no interaction between L1
and L3. The aggregated findings point to a hybrid representation, with both compound and
coordinate representations being possible.