Presenter

Timi Emiloju, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta

Abstract

Models of bilinguals’ lexical access usually assume a single conceptual store that can be accessed through either language. If so, bilinguals should show a great deal of overlap (in concepts and in order) in the words that they generate in a semantic verbal fluency (SVF) task. They might also use a lot of cognates in their second language to help ease lexical retrieval. Cognates are defined as words that are observed to be similar in meaning and form in two languages. Undergraduate students enrolled in the first semester of introductory French or Spanish participated in this study. They performed a SVF task in English at the beginning of the semester and in French/Spanish at the end of the semester. The results showed that participants averaged 62% semantic overlap in the two languages and the order of the words was only weakly correlated. Curiously, participants produced more cognates in English than in French/Spanish. These results challenge some of the assumptions about how beginning second language learners access words: these results suggest that they are relying weakly (at best) on conceptual knowledge from their first language.

Poster

Authors & Affiliations

Oluwatimilehin Emiloju, E. Nicoladis (Psychology Department, University of Alberta)