A mouse with a roof? eVects of phonological neighbors on processing of words in sentences in a non-native language  

Oleh:

Rüschemeyer, Shirley-Ann ; Nojack, Agnes ; Limbach, Maxi

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Brain and Language (Full Text) vol. 104 no. 2 (2008), page 132-144.
Topik: Bilingualism; ERPs; Sentence comprehension; Word comprehension; Phonological neighbors
Fulltext: 104_02_R-schemeyer.pdf (1.13MB)

Isi artikel

The architecture of the language processing system for speakers of more than one language remains an intriguing topic of research. A common Wnding is that speakers of multiple languages are slower at responding to language stimuli in their non-native language (L2) than monolingual speakers. This may simply reXect participants’ unfamiliarity with words in the L2, however it may also be the reXection of interference from competing lexical alternatives both across and within the participants’ multiple languages. In the current studies (one behavioral, one electrophysiological) we investigate how interference from phonologically similar words within the L2 alone may account for problems in auditory language comprehension in non-native speakers. To this end a cross modal lexical priming (CMLP) paradigm was implemented, which allowed us to look for eVects of spoken word primes embedded in sentences on the recognition of target stimuli. SpeciWcally, we investigated whether a word such as mouse, which has a close phonological neighbor, house, would show a modulating eVect on recognition of a word semantically related to house but not to mouse (i.e., roof). We hypothesized that L2 speakers, less eYcient at categorizing phonemes in their L2 would show a diVerence in the processing of roof preceded by mouse as compared to roof preceded by another unrelated word, such as lamp, due to a residual co-activation of the phonological neighbor mouse. Furthermore, L1 speakers, highly proWcient at recognizing phonemes in their native tongue, should show no such eVect. The results of both studies clearly support our hypothesis, indicating that phonological neighbors in the L2 may greatly interfere with L2 word recognition.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali