Summary:

Weinreich (1953) introduced three types of bilinguals (i.e., co-ordinate, compound, and subordinate) to describe how bilinguals store and represent two languages in their minds. He did not know how subordinate bilinguals become co-ordinate bilinguals. Kroll and Stewart (1994) introduced a model that might depict how second language learners (subordinate bilinguals) develop their second language skills to be co-ordinate or compound bilinguals. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) suggests that at the early stage of second language acquisition, the second language (L2) lexicon is attached to the first language (L1) equivalent. Then the L1 lexicon has a direct access to its concept or meaning. However, Altarriba and Mathis' (1997) findings demonstrated that in a matter of one intensive language lesson it was sufficient to have a direct access from L2 lexicon to its concept.

Altarriba and Mathis' study (Experiment 2) was replicated and modified by using a Japanese-English bilingual Stroop task and by adding a variety of orthography types. There were two experimental groups: fluent Japanese-English biscriptals, and college students who had never studied Japanese kanji characters (logographs like Chinese). In this study, three different types of orthography were implemented (English, romaji, and kanji) to observe the effect of script types in Japanese word acquisition. English is alphabetic, romaji uses alphabet letters to represent Japanese words, and kanji is logographic. Stroop task was used to observe a direct automatic lexical access for a particular script.

The results indicated that Japanese-English bilinguals seem to store the two languages in a separate system (as other literature suggested), and as for the novice learners it seems that one language lesson was not sufficient to observe the direct access from L2 to its concept. Compared to kanji characters, romaji showed greater interference although it was not statistically significant. This may sugest that shifting the lexical access from L1 in alphabetic script to L2 in logographic script may take a different lexical process and thus it would take longer time to develop automatic lexical processing skills than when L1 and L2 share the same script type.

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