THE STRUCTURE OF THE TRILINGUAL LEXICON

Two experiments were performed with trilingual subjects, for whom Arabic was the first language and Hebrew and English were then acquired. The first experiment employed a trilingual Stroop colour naming test to measure the different interference effects among the three languages. In the second experiment, a trilingual picture-word naming paradigm was used to compare picture naming and translations in the three languages. The results of the two experiments indicate a coordinate relationship between Hebrew and English, and a compound relationship between each of these two languages and Arabic. The pattern of these relationships gives support to the suggestion that the relationship between the representations of the different languages should be seen from a developmental perspective.