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Bilingualism

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Figuring Out How Verb-Particle Constructions Are Understood During L1 And L2 Reading, Mehrgol Tiv, Laura Gonnerman, Veronica Whitford, Deanna Friesen, Debra Jared, Debra Titone Jul 2019

Figuring Out How Verb-Particle Constructions Are Understood During L1 And L2 Reading, Mehrgol Tiv, Laura Gonnerman, Veronica Whitford, Deanna Friesen, Debra Jared, Debra Titone

Education Publications

The aim of this paper was to investigate first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading of verb particle constructions (VPCs) among English–French bilingual adults. VPCs, or phrasal verbs, are highly common collocations of a verb paired with a particle, such as eat up or chew out, that often convey a figurative meaning. VPCs vary in form (eat up the candy vs. eat the candy up) and in other factors, such as the semantic contribution of the constituent words to the overall meaning (semantic transparency) and frequency. Much like classic forms of idioms, VPCs are difficult for L2 users. Here, we present …


The Impact Of Individual Differences On Cross-Language Activation Of Meaning By Phonology, Deanna Friesen, Veronica Whitford, Debra Titone, Debra Jared Apr 2019

The Impact Of Individual Differences On Cross-Language Activation Of Meaning By Phonology, Deanna Friesen, Veronica Whitford, Debra Titone, Debra Jared

Education Publications

We investigated how individual differences in language proficiency and executive control impact cross-language meaning activation through phonology. Ninety-six university students read English sentences that contained French target words. Target words were high- and low-frequency French interlingual homophones (i.e., words that share pronunciation, but not meaning across langauges; mot means ‘word’ in French and sounds like ‘mow’ in English) and matched French control words (e.g., mois – ‘month’ in French). Readers could use the homophones’ shared phonology to activate their English meanings and, ultimately, make sense of the sentence (e.g., Tony was too lazy to mot/mois the grass on Sunday) …


Cultural Context As A Biasing Factor For Language Activation In Bilinguals, Matthias Berkes, Deanna Friesen, Ellen Bialystok Jan 2018

Cultural Context As A Biasing Factor For Language Activation In Bilinguals, Matthias Berkes, Deanna Friesen, Ellen Bialystok

Education Publications

Two studies investigated how cultural context and familiarity impact lexical access in Korean-English bilingual and English monolingual adults. ERPs were recorded while participants decided whether a word and picture matched or not. Pictures depicted versions of objects that were prototypically associated with North American or Korean culture and named in either English or Korean, creating culturally congruent and incongruent trials. For bilinguals, culturally congruent trials facilitated responding but ERP results showed that images from both cultures were processed similarly. For monolinguals, culturally incongruent pairs produced longer RTs and larger N400s than congruent items, indicating more effortful processing. Thus, an unfamiliar …


Attention During Visual Search: The Benefit Of Bilingualism, Deanna Friesen, Vered Latman, Alejandra Calvo, Ellen Bialystok Jan 2015

Attention During Visual Search: The Benefit Of Bilingualism, Deanna Friesen, Vered Latman, Alejandra Calvo, Ellen Bialystok

Education Publications

Recent research has produced mixed results about the existence of a bilingual executive control advantage in young adults. The current study manipulated both task demands and task difficulty to investigate the conditions under which a bilingual advantage may be observed during a visual attention task. Bilingual and monolingual young adults performed visual search tasks in which they determined whether a target shape was present amid distractor shapes. In the feature searches, the target (e.g., green triangle) differed on a single dimension (e.g., color) from the distractors (e.g., yellow triangles); in the conjunction searches, two different types of distractors (e.g., pink …