A case study of lexical access efficiency in an Arabic-English-Croatian trilingual

In the globalized world, marked by language group intermixing, speakers of multiple languages are a widespread phenomenon. This research deals with how one such person accesses their lexical entries, consisting of meanings corresponding to words, in their multilingual mental lexicon. This case study examines the efficiency of lexical access in a speaker of English, Croatian and Arabic, who is named Ruby for the purpose of this research. The thesis aims to test if the Weaker Links hypothesis (Gollan et al. 2008) applies to the trilingual’s receptive vocabulary performance in English and Croatian. In accordance with that, the study’s hypothesis was that Ruby would perform better in the language she used more out of the two – English. The participant’s frequency of language usage was investigated through a questionnaire. Then she took two visual picture-vocabulary tests, which were partly identical to those used by Zovko Dinković and Šojer (2012): the first in English and the second in Croatian. Immediately after that, her performance was discussed in a retrospective interview. Although Ruby accomplished equal results on both tests, she was more successful on the English test, based on her interview statements. They revealed that only a small portion of her correct responses on the Croatian test represented efficient lexical access to Croatian test words in her mental lexicon. Ruby’s arguments for choosing many other correct responses on both tests showed, among other things, her reduced lexical access and her misunderstanding of test words. As predicted, the trilingual’s lexical access was more efficient in the language that she used more. The results are quite specific and can hardly be generalized. Nevertheless, they coincided with Zovko Dinković and Šojer’s (2012) findings, which were obtained from testing bilinguals’ reception of spoken language with largely identical materials. In this manner, their results may be extended to a trilingual case, tested in a different modality.