Overlapping networks: Examining the multilingual mental lexicon through the word association task

The goal of this study was to explore L1/L2/L3 word interconnections when using a word association task. Sixty-six Tagalog-English bilinguals learning Spanish as an L3 took a discrete ‘free language’ word association task in which they responded to an L3 cue with any word that came to mind in any language they knew. We studied how the distribution of response types changed as L3 proficiency increased and compared it to previous research. We also analysed the effect of L3 proficiency, language dominance, and recently used language on response language. Like in previous studies, the findings showed that as one’s L3 proficiency level increases, the response types commonly produced at lower levels, i.e., form-based responses and translation equivalents, decrease. Conversely, more meaning-based and position-based responses are produced as L3 proficiency increases. An interaction effect of language dominance, recently used language, and L3 proficiency was also attested. We interpreted these findings as evidence of the Parasitic Model (Hall & Ecke, 2003): L3 words have ‘attached’ themselves to L1 or L2 words and are restructured as the participants’ L3 reaches higher levels.