Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Association Strength Between Concepts As The Origin Of The "Foreign Language Effect", Emilia Ezrina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals sometimes make decisions in verbal tasks differently in their first (L1) and second (L2) language. This phenomenon is known as the foreign language effect (FLE), and it suggests strong connections between language and cognition. On the one hand, it is possible that L2 “blunts” emotional language. However, the FLE can be observed in non-emotional tasks. Therefore, it is possible that L2 requires more deliberate processing due to increased cognitive load, leading to more rational decisions. The support for each explanation is mixed.

In this thesis we propose looking for a single explanation for all instances of the FLE. After …

The Influence Of Native Language And Sentence Form On Memory Of Motion Events, Stephanie L. Lopez

LSU Master's Theses

This study utilized four experiments to investigate the extent to which native language influences memory in accordance with linguistic relativity. In Experiment 1, monolingual English speakers and Spanish/English bilinguals were divided into a verbal encoding condition and a verbal suppression encoding condition and watched motion events of low or high physical salience. Participants engaged in a recognition memory task followed by an event memory similarity judgment task. In Experiment 2, native monolingual English speakers were divided into an English-like (or manner-on-verb) description group, a Spanish-like (or path-on-verb) description group, mimicking the language groups of Experiment 1 respectively, and a verbal …

Automaticity Of Lexical Access In Deaf And Hearing Bilinguals: Cross-Linguistic Evidence From The Color Stroop Task Across Five Languages, Rain G. Bosworth, Sarah C. Tyler, Eli M. Binder, Jill P. Morford

Articles

The well-known Stroop interference effect has been instrumental in revealing the highly automated nature of lexical processing as well as providing new insights to the underlying lexical organization of first and second languages within proficient bilinguals. The present cross-linguistic study had two goals: 1) to examine Stroop interference for dynamic signs and printed words in deaf ASL-English bilinguals who report no reliance on speech or audiological aids; 2) to compare Stroop interference effects in several groups of bilinguals whose two languages range from very distinct to very similar in their shared orthographic patterns: ASL-English bilinguals (very distinct), Chinese-English bilinguals (low …

The Effects Of Linguistic Labels On Object Categorization And Perception, Xuan Pan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that speakers of different languages perceive and conceptualize the world differently. Language-thought interaction is likely to be more complex in bilinguals because they have two languages that could influence their cognitive and perceptual processes.Lupyan’s (2012) Label-feedback Hypothesis proposes a mechanism underpinning language-thought interactions, arguingthat linguistic labels affect our conceptual and perceptual representations through top-down feedback.This thesis tested the Label-feedback Hypothesis by capitalizing on an interesting feature of Chinese. In English, most nouns do not provide linguistic clues to their categories (an exception issunflower), whereas in Chinese, some nouns provide explicit category …

Bilingualism, Executive Function, And Beyond: Questions And Insights, Irina A. Sekerina, Lauren Spradlin, Virginia V. Valian

Publications and Research

The papers in this volume continue the quest to investigate the moderating factors and understand the mechanisms underlying effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They grew out of a 2015 workshop organized by two of us (Irina Sekerina and Virginia Valian) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, funded by NSF’s Developmental and Learning Sciences and Linguistics Programs (grant #1451631). The workshop’s goal was to bring together researchers whose fields did not always overlap and who could learn from each other’s insights. In attendance were linguists working on …

Conceptual Representation In Bilinguals: A Feature-Based Approach, Eriko Matsuki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A challenge for bilinguals is that translation equivalent words often do not convey exactly the same conceptual information. A bilingual exhibits a “semantic accent” when they comprehend or use a word in one language in a way that is influenced by knowledge of its translation equivalent. Semantic accents are well-captured by feature-based models, such as the Distributed Conceptual Feature model and the Shared (Distributed) Asymmetrical model, however, few empirical studies have used semantic features to provide direct evidence for these models. The goal of this thesis is to use a feature-based approach to identify conceptual differences in translation equivalent words …

Native Language Adaptation To Novel Verb Argument Structures By Spanish-English Bilinguals: An Electrophysiological Investigation, Eve Higby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilinguals have to learn two different grammatical systems. Some aspects of these grammars may be similar across the two languages (for example, the active-passive alternation) while others may exist in only one of the two grammars (for example, the distinction between recent and distant past). This dissertation investigates the degree to which grammar information specific to only one language is available when processing the other language. In particular, the current study focuses on the application of grammatical structures from the bilinguals’ second-learned language to their first-learned language, a direction of language transfer not often investigated. Based on a Shared Syntax …

L2 Effect On Bilingual Spanish/English Encoding Of Motion Events: Does Manner Salience Transfer?, Heidi E. Parker

Open Access Dissertations

This study explores the potential effect of a second language (L2) on first language (L1) encoding of motion events. The domain of interest is MANNER and the goal is to investigate if the degree of manner salience can be restructured under the effect of a L2. Slobin (2004, 2006) proposes an expansion of Talmy’s (1985, 1991, 2000) binary typology and observes that the degree of manner saliencevaries cross-linguistically. The two languages investigated in this study, Spanish and English, are at divergent points along the cline of manner salience. In addition, Slobin (1996b) suggests dividing MANNER into tier one (T1) …

Re-Examining The Bilingual Advantage On Interference-Control And Task-Switching Tasks: A Meta-Analysis, Seamus Donnelly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A much-debated topic in psycholinguistics is whether lifelong bilingualism enhances executive functions (EF), the set of higher-order cognitive processes involved in the control of thought and action. Several researchers have predicted bilingual advantages on various EF tasks, especially interference-control and task-switching tasks. Many studies have tested these predictions, but results have proven unreliable. As a complementary approach to recent quantitative syntheses on this topic, the present dissertation tests whether the bilingual advantage is moderated by a number of theoretically significant variables: dependent variable (DV), task, age, age of L2 acquisition and lab.

Two meta-analyses were conducted. Study 1 considered interference-control …

Linguistic Cognition And Bimodalism: A Study Of Motion And Location In The Confluence Of Spanish And Spain’S Sign Language, Francisco Meizoso

Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to study the intrapersonal and symbolic function of gesture by a very specific type of population: hearing speakers of Spanish who, having been born to deaf parents, grew up developing a bimodal (Spanish and Spain’s Sign Language) linguistic interface, which borrows elements from the manual and spoken modalities. In the ordering of gestures devised by Kendon (1988) and cited by McNeill (1992), gesticulation and sign languages are placed at opposite ends of a continuum. At one end, gesticulation is formed by idiosyncratic spontaneous gestures lacking any conventional linguistic proprieties, which are produced in combination …

Examining The Intersection Of The Cognitive Advantages And Disadvantages Of The Bilingual Brain, Irina Rabkina

Scripps Senior Theses

Two conflicting findings characterize cognitive processing accompanying bilingualism. The “bilingual advantage” refers to improved cognitive performance for bilingual compared to monolingual participants. Most bilingual advantages fall under the umbrella of cognitive control mechanisms, most frequently demonstrated using the Stroop task and the Simon task (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Coderre, Van Heuven, & Conklin, 2013). The “bilingual disadvantage,” on the other hand, refers to bilinguals’ diminished performance on tasks that require word retrieval or switching between languages. This study examined the intersection of the bilingual advantage and the bilingual disadvantage to investigate whether they stem from a single cognitive control process. The …

Effects Of Bilingualism On Goal Representation And Maintenance, Amina Saadaoui

Theses Digitization Project

The main focus of this study was to examine whether the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is due to the bilinguals' ability to represent and maintain goal information in working memory. Cognitive control, also referred to as executive control, is the ability to inhibit one cognitive task while executing another task.

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 Lexical Disambiguation In Context: The Role Of Non-Selective Cross-Language Activation, Ana I. Schwartz, Li-Hao Yeh, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes

Ana I Schwartz

The present study tested whether lexical disambiguation in sentence context is affected by cross-language lexical activation. In Experiment 1 Spanish-English bilinguals read English sentences biasing the subordinate meaning of homonyms that were either cognates or non-cognates. Participants’ ability to reject follow-up target words related to the dominant meaning showed greatest inhibition when the homonym was a cognate and the dominant meaning was shared with Spanish. In Experiment 2 a separate group of bilinguals read sentences biasing the dominant meaning of the homonyms and were instructed to accept target words related to any meaning of the homonym. In this case cognate …

On A Different Plane: Cross-Language Effects On The Conceptual Representations Of Within-Language Homonyms, Ana B. Areas, Ana I. Schwartz

Ana I Schwartz

We examined whether bilinguals’ conceptual representation of homonyms in one language are influenced by meanings in the other. 117 Spanish-English bilinguals generated sentences for 62 English homonyms that were also cognates with Spanish and which shared at least one meaning with Spanish (e.g., plane/plano). Production probabilities for each meaning were calculated. A stepwise multiple regression revealed that whether a meaning was shared with Spanish or not accounted for a significant portion of the variance, even after entering production probabilities from published monolingual norms. (Twilley et al., 1994). Homonyms classified as highly polarized based on monolingual responses became less polarized if …

Working Memory Influences On Cross-Language Activation During Bilingual Lexical Disambiguation, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes, Ana I. Schwartz

Ana I Schwartz

This study investigated the role of verbal working memory on bilingual lexical disambiguation. Spanish-English bilinguals with low and high digit span read sentences in their second language ending in a cognate homonym (novel), noncognate homonym (fast), cognate (piano) or non-cognate (pencil). The dominant meanings of cognate homonyms were shared across languages while subordinate meanings were unique to the second language. Participants decided whether follow-up targets were related in meaning to the sentence. On critical trials sentences biased the subordinate meaning of the homonym and targets were related to the dominant meaning (novel – BOOK; fast – SPEED), forcing rejection of …

The Representation Of Multiple Translations In Bilingual Memory : An Examination Of Lexical Organization For Concrete, Abstract, And Emotion Words In Spanish-English Bilinguals, Dana M. Basnight-Brown

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Tokowicz and Kroll (2007) originally reported that the number of translations a word has across languages influences the speed with which bilinguals translate concrete and abstract words from one language to another. The current work examines how the number of translations that characterize a word influences bilingual lexical organization and the processing of concrete, abstract and emotional stimuli. Experiment 1 examined whether the number-of-translations effect reported previously could be obtained in a different task (i.e., lexical decision task) using the same materials presented by Tokowicz and Kroll. Decision latencies revealed no significant differences between concrete and abstract words, which suggested …

Lexical Representation Of Second Language Words: Implications For Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition And Use, Ana I. Schwartz, Li-Hao Yeh, Moira P. Shaw

Ana I Schwartz

The goal of the present study was to examine whether cross-language activation of a bilingual’s native language influences the processing of lexical ambiguity within a second language. Highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals performed a semantic verification task in which sentence frames were followed by the presentation of the final word of the sentence (the prime word). Participants then decided whether a follow-up target word was related to the meaning of the sentence. On critical trials the sentences ended in a semantically ambiguous word that was either a cognate with Spanish (e.g., novel), or a noncognate control matched on frequency and length …

Cross-Language Mediated Priming: Effects Of Context And Lexical Relationship, Ana I. Schwartz, Ana B. Areas Da Luz Fontes

Ana I Schwartz

We examined how linguistic context influences the nature of bilingual lexical activation. We hypothesized that in single-word context, form-related words would receive the strongest activation while, in sentence context, semantically related words would receive the strongest activation. Spanish-English bilinguals performed a semantic verification task on English target words preceded by a prime. On critical trials, the prime and target words were paired based either on a form-mediated relationship through the native language (L1), [e.g., bark (barco): BOAT] (Experiment 1) or on a semantically-mediated relationship [e.g., boat (barco): BARK] (Experiment 2). The prime word was presented either in isolation or after …

Using Cognates To Investigate Cross-Language Competition In Second Language Processing, Gretchen Sunderman, Ana I. Schwartz

Ana I Schwartz

No abstract provided.

Language Comprehension In Bilingual Speakers, Ana I. Schwartz, Judith F. Kroll

Ana I Schwartz

No abstract provided.

Reading Words In Spanish And English: Mapping Orthography To Phonology In Two Languages, Ana I. Schwartz, Judith F. Kroll, Michele Diaz

Ana I Schwartz

English-Spanish bilinguals named visually presented words aloud in each language. The words included cognates (e.g., fruit-fruta) and non-cognate translations, (e.g., pencil-lápiz). The cognates were selected so that the orthographic and phonological similarity of their lexical form in each language varied orthogonally. Cognate naming latencies were influenced by the cross-language match of the orthographic and phonological codes. When the orthographic forms were similar in the two languages, naming latencies were slowed by dissimilar phonology, providing evidence for feed-forward activation from orthography to phonology across languages. When the orthographic forms were dissimilar, the effects of the corresponding phonological match were not statistically …

Bilingual Lexical Activation In Sentence Context, Ana I. Schwartz, Judith F. Kroll

Ana I Schwartz

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals’ L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., piano); and homographs (e.g., pan)] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living in a bilingual community (Experiment 1) and with intermediate proficiency Spanish-English bilinguals living in a monolingual community (Experiment 2). To determine the influence of sentence constraint on cross-language activation, the critical words and their matched controls were inserted in low- and high-constraint sentences. In low-constraint sentences significant cognate facilitation was observed, suggesting that both languages were …

A Cognitive View Of The Bilingaul Lexicon: Reading And Speaking Words In Two Languages, Judith F. Kroll, Bianca M. Sumutka, Ana I. Schwartz

Ana I Schwartz

No abstract provided.