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Cross-linguistic activation in bilingual sentence processing: The role of word class meaning*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2010

KRISTOF BATEN ,
FABRICE HOFMAN  and
TOM LOEYS
KRISTOF BATEN*
Affiliation:
German Department Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University
FABRICE HOFMAN
Affiliation:
German Department Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University
TOM LOEYS
Affiliation:
Department of Data Analysis Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University
*
Address for correspondence: Kristof Baten, German Department, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium[email protected]
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Abstract

This study investigates how categorial (word class) semantics influences cross-linguistic interactions when reading in L2. Previous homograph studies paid little attention to the possible influence of different word classes in the stimulus material on cross-linguistic activation. The present study examines the word recognition performance of Dutch–English bilinguals who performed a lexical decision task to word targets appearing in a sentence. To determine the influence of word class meaning, the critical words either showed a word class overlap (e.g. the homograph tree [noun], which means “step” in Dutch) or not (e.g. big [adj], which is a noun in Dutch meaning “piglet”). In the condition of word class overlap, a facilitation effect was observed, suggesting that both languages were active. When there was no word class overlap, the facilitation effect disappeared. This result suggests that categorial meaning affects the word recognition process of bilinguals.

Keywords

sentence processingvisual word recognitionsemantic constraintword class
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 351 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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Footnotes

*

We gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the students from Ghent University. We also wish to thank Frederic Lamsens and Gitte Callaert for technical support, and Sien Uytterschout for her comments on language. We also thank Marc Brysbaert and Janet van Hell for their valuable comments on an earlier version. The study's results were presented at the Second Language Research Forum, held at Michigan State University, East-Lansing, 29 October – 1 November 2009.

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