Date of Award

2010-01-01

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Psychology

Advisor(s)

Ana I. Schwartz

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of working memory capacity, access to subordinate meanings of L1 homonyms and degree of cross-language activation on the access to subordinate meanings of L2 homonyms. In Experiment 1, Spanish-English bilinguals completed a word recognition task which assessed how quickly and accurately they accessed subordinate meanings of English homonyms that were either noncognates (e.g. fast/rápido) or cognates (e.g. letter/letra) with Spanish. In Experiment 2, another group of Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences while having their eye-movements recorded for measures of lexical access. On the critical trials, sentences contained a homonym that was either a noncognate or cognate with Spanish. The context preceding the target word (i.e. homonym) was either biased to the subordinate meaning or neutral. General analyses from Experiments 1 and 2 showed that access to subordinate meanings of cognate homonyms was facilitated compared to access to subordinate meanings of noncognate homonyms. Analyses of the individual differences factors revealed that access to subordinate meanings of L1 homonyms was the most consistent predictor of access to subordinate meanings of L2 homonyms. These findings are discussed in terms of how these individual differences should be taken into account to better model the dynamics of bilingual lexical disambiguation.

Language

en

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Size

133 pages

File Format

application/pdf

Rights Holder

Ana B. Areas da Luz Fontes

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