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Abstract This study explores the activation of Chinese in Uygur-Chinese-English trilingual processing of English words, using the long-term repetition priming paradigm. Two experiments were conducted for this purpose. In Experiment One, the participants completed a lexical decision task, which was used to explore the activation of Chinese at the lexical level. This experiment has found a significant priming effect, indicating that Chinese information, at the lexical level, can be activated in the processing of English words. In Experiment Two, the participants completed a biological decision task, which was used to explore the activation of Chinese at the conceptual level. This experiment has revealed a significant but weak and unstable priming effect, indicating that Chinese information, at the conceptual level, can only be partially activated in the processing of English words. These findings further indicate that there is a pattern of dominant lexical connection and subdominant conceptual connection between Chinese and English in Uygur-Chinese-English trilingual mental lexicon. The findings of this study provide new evidence for the role of L2 in the mental representation of L3. It also reveals some implications for foreign language vocabulary teaching in ethnic minority areas of China.
Key words: Uygur-Chinese-English trilinguals; cross-language activation; long-term repetition
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