The effect of dialect on bilingual lexical processing and representation
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: Linguistics, Department of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Szakay, Anita
issued: 2012-12-20T22:20:37Z
issued: 2012
related degree: Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: Psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism generally investigate how linguistic information is shared between a listener's first language (L1) and second language (L2) at the conceptual level and in the lexicon. At the same time speech perception studies examine how social information affects language processing and representation. This dissertation brings these two lines of research together and demonstrates that the L1 and L2 are connected through a social category activation link, in addition to previously proposed conceptual and lexical links. In particular, I show that the activation of ethnicity operates under a shared system across the L1 and L2 during both immediate speech processing and long-term abstract representations. This claim is supported by sensitivity and reaction time results from two priming experiments. In a novel cross-language / cross-dialect paradigm, English (L1) - Maori (L2) bilingual New Zealanders participated in a short-term and a long-term auditory lexical decision task (72 and 45 subjects respectively), where critical prime and target pairs were made up of English-to-Maori and Maori-to-English translation equivalents. Half of the English target words were pronounced by standard New Zealand Pakeha English speakers and half by Maori English speakers, thus creating nine test conditions: four bilingual conditions, four English-only conditions, and a within-Maori repetition priming condition. Each critical English word contained one of four sociophonetic variables: theta, final /z/, and the GOOSE or GOAT vowels. The results reveal a stronger connection between Maori and Maori English representations than between Maori and Pakeha English representations both in short-term processing and long-term mental representations. I argue for the existence of an ethnicity activation link between the L1 and L2. The strength of this link varies based on the directionality and time-course of activation, the sociophonetic variable in the word, and the listen…
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/43740
note: The Effect of Dialect on Bilingual Lexical Processing and Representation by Anita Szakay B.A., University of Canterbury, 2005 B.A. (Hons), University of Canterbury, 2006 M.A., University of Canterbury, 2007 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in The Faculty of Graduate Studies (Linguistics) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) December 2012 c© Anita Szakay 2012 Abstract Psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism generally investigate how linguistic information is shared between a listener’s first language (L1) and second language (L2) at the conceptual level and in the lexicon. At the same time speech perception studies examine how social information affects language processing and representation. This dissertation brings these two lines of re- search together and demonstrates that the L1 and L2 are connected through a social category activation link, in addition to previously proposed concep- tual and lexical links. In particular, I show that the activation of ethnicity operates under a shared system across the L1 and L2 during both immedi- ate speech processing and long-term abstract representations. This claim is supported by sensitivity and reaction time results from two priming exper- iments. In a novel cross-language / cross-dialect paradigm, English (L1) – Māori (L2) bilingual New Zealanders participated in a short-term and a long-term auditory lexical decision task (72 and 45 subjects respectively), where crit- ical prime and target pairs were made up of English-to-Māori and Māori- to-English translation equivalents. Half of the English target words were pronounced by standard New Zealand Pākehā English speakers and half by Māori English speakers, thus creating nine test conditions: four bilin- gual conditions, four English-only conditions, and a within-Māori repetition priming condition. Each critical English word contained one of four socio- phonetic variables: /T/, final /z/, …
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2013-05
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0073468
language: eng
degree discipline: Linguistics
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43740