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University of Texas at El Paso

2011

Bilingualism

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Role Of Cross-Language Activation In Syntactic Ambiguity, Li-Hao Yeh Jan 2011

The Role Of Cross-Language Activation In Syntactic Ambiguity, Li-Hao Yeh

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

There is much evidence demonstrating that bilinguals activate lexical representations from both of their languages in a non-selective manner even in sentence context. Comparatively less research has examined the extent to which bilingual lexical representations interacts with syntactic processing in sentence context. The purpose of this study is to examine whether bilinguals' cross-language lexical activation could influence their resolution of syntactic ambiguity (e.g. relative clause attachment). Proper attachment of relative clauses (RC) to noun phrases is critical for accurate interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences. For instance, the sentence The robber shot the secretary of my husband who goes to work …


Bilingual Homonym Disambiguation At The Discourse Level, Yvette Aguilar Baca Jan 2011

Bilingual Homonym Disambiguation At The Discourse Level, Yvette Aguilar Baca

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of global context and local context on the time course of activation of cognate homonyms for bilingual readers. Of interest was whether meaning frequency, context, and cross-language activation modulated the time course of activation of the subordinate meaning of cognate homonyms. Also, whether the subordinate bias effect would be altered or even eliminated by the combined influence of such contextual factors and cross-language activation. Eye movements of Spanish-English bilinguals were measured using an eye-tracking device while they read English paragraphs. The paragraphs contained cognate homonyms (e.g. novel/novela), cognate non-homonyms (e.g. …