Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T08:02:11.523Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Divergence and overlap in bilingual conceptual representation: does prior language brokering experience matter?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

BELEM G. LÓPEZ  and
JYOTSNA VAID
BELEM G. LÓPEZ*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
JYOTSNA VAID
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
*
Address for correspondence: Belem G. López, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The present research examined whether conceptual divergence is reduced in bilinguals with extensive informal translation experience. Across two experiments, Spanish–English bilinguals (brokers vs. non-brokers) generated exemplars for 10 categories, using the same or different language across sessions. Both groups demonstrated more divergence for different than same language responses across sessions a week apart. More convergence was found in both groups for no delay compared to delayed responses. Brokers showed significantly more convergence in exemplars than non-brokers; for both immediate and delayed sessions Findings indicate exemplars are differentially accessible depending on language and timing of response, but also individual differences in brokering experience. Extensive brokering experience may lead to a more integrated conceptual representation for features of concepts shared across languages. Findings support concept models that emphasize the dynamic and distributed nature of concepts, and underscore the need to consider the cognitive impact of systematic sources of variability among bilinguals.

Keywords

bilinguallanguage brokeringcategory structuretranslationsemantic fluency
Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 150 - 161
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

A number of student research assistants at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas provided invaluable help in data collection and coding: Kelly Milliken, Eleazar Montes, Zaira Cortes, Katerin Cerrato, Mayra Chantal Bonilla, Esteffania Lezama, Gerardo Morales Mendez, Katarina Antolovic, and Melissa Solano. We are grateful to Roberto Heredia, Anna Cieslicka and Monica Muñoz for facilitating access to participants at TAMIU, where part of the data were collected for Experiment 2. We also thank Dr. Michel Paradis, Dr. Debra Jared, and three reviewers for their comments on the manuscript. Portions of this research were presented at the 2013 meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Toronto. Preparation of this manuscript was supported in part by a Faculty Development Leave awarded to the second author by Texas A&M University.

References

Baum, S., & Titone, D. (2014). Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging. Applied Psycholinguistics 35, 857–894.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bellezza, F. S. (1984). Reliability of retrieval from semantic memory: common categories. Bulletin of Psychonomic Science, 22 (4), 324–326.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berney, T., & Cooper, R. (1969). Semantic independence and degree of bilingualism in two communities. The Modern Language Journal, 53 (3), 182–185.Google Scholar
Cohen, J. (1960). A coefficient for agreement for nominal scales. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 20, 687–699.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cook, V. (1991). The poverty of the stimulus argument and multicompetence. Second Language Research, 7, 103–117.Google Scholar
Dunn, A. L., & Fox Tree, J. E. (2009). A quick, gradient Bilingual Dominance Scale. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12 (3), 273–289.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flege, J. E., Mackay, Ian R. A., & Piske, T. (2002). Assessing bilingual dominance. Applied Psycholinguistics, 23, 567–598.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garcia, A. Ibanez, I., Huepe, D., Houck, A., Michon, M., Lezama, C. G., Chadha, S., & Rivera-Rei, A. (2014). Word reading and translation in bilinguals: the impact of formal and informal translation expertise. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, Article 1302, 1–14.Google Scholar
Genesee, F. (2014). Commentary on “Moving toward a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism”: The early years. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35, 905–909.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, D. W. (2014). Individual variability and neuroplastic changes. Applied Psycholinguistics, 35 (5), 910–912.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grosjean, F. (1989). Neurolinguists, beware! The bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person. Brain and Language, 36 (1), 3–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guan, S-S A., Nash, A., & Orellana, M. F. (2016). Cultural and social processes of language brokering among Arab, Asian, and Latin immigrants. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37 (2), 150–166.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hull, R., Tosun, S., & Vaid, J. (2016). What's so funny? Modelling incongruity in humor production. Cognition and Emotion. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2015.1129314 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kastenbaum, J. (2015). The influence of proficiency and language combination on bilingual lexical access. M.Sc. thesis, Boston University.Google Scholar
Kolers, P. A. (1963). Interlingual word associations. Journal of Verbal learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 291–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lambert, W. E., & Moore, N. (1966). Word association responses: Comparisons of American and French monolinguals with Canadian monolinguals and bilinguals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 3 (3), 313–320.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lichtenberk, F., Vaid, J., & Chen, H-C. (2011). On the interpretation of alienable and inalienable possession: A psycholinguistic investigation. Cognitive Linguistics, 22 (4), 659–689.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
López, B. G., & Vaid, J. (2016, under review). Facil or A piece of cake: Does variability in bilingual language brokering experience affect idiom comprehension? Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malt, B., & Majid, A. (2013). How thought is mapped onto words. WIRES Cognitive Science, 4 (6), 583–597.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malt, B. C., Ping, L., Pavlenko, A., Zhu, H., & Ameel, E. (2015). Bidirectional lexical interaction in Mandarin-English bilinguals, Journal of Memory and Language, 82, 86–104.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morales, A., & Hanson, W. E. (2005). Language brokering: An integrative review of the literature: Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 27 (4), 471–503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, M. (1997). The cognitive neuropsychology of bilingualism. In Groot, A. M. B. de & Kroll, J. F. (Eds.), Tutorials in bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (331–354). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Paradis, M. (2004). A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, M. (2007). L1 attrition features predicted by a neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. In Köpke, B. and Schmid, B. (eds.), First language attrition (pp. 121–134). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paradis, M. (2014a). The nature of concepts. Unpublished manuscript, McGill University.Google Scholar
Paradis, M. (2014b). Personal communication, November 19, 2014.Google Scholar
Pavlenko, A., & Malt, B. C. (2011). Kitchen Russian: Cross-linguistic differences and first- language object naming by Russian–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14 (01), 19–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pekkala, S. (2012). Verbal fluency tasks and the neuropsychology of language. In Faust, M. (Ed.), The handbook of the neuropsychology of language, Volume 1&;2 (pp. 619–634). Oxford, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peña, E., Bedore, L., & Zlatic-Giunta, R. (2002). Category-generation performance of bilingual children: The influence of condition, category, and language. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 45, 938–947.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roberts, P. M., & LeDorze, G. L. (1997). Semantic organization, strategy use, and productivity in bilingual semantic verbal fluency. Brain and Language, 59 (3), 412–449.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, I. (1976). Similarity between French and English words—a factor to be considered in bilingual language behavior? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 5 (1), 85–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tse, L. (1995). Language brokering among Latino adolescents: Prevalence, attitudes, and school performance. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 17 (2), 180–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tzou, Y-Z., Eslami, Z., Chen, H-C., & Vaid, J. (2012). Effect of language proficiency and degree of formal training in simultaneous interpreting on working memory and interpreting performance: Evidence from Mandarin-English speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism, 16, 213–227.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tzou, Y-Z., Vaid, J., & Chen, H-C. (2016). Does formal training in translation/interpreting affect translation strategy? Evidence from idiom translation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1–10. DOI: 1017/S1366728915000929 Google Scholar
Vaid, J. (2006). Joking across languages: Perspectives on humor, emotion, and bilingualism. In Pavlenko, A. (Ed.), Bilingual minds: Emotional experience, expression, and representation (pp. 152–182). Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaid, J. (2012). Language proficiency and brokering questionnaire. Texas A&M University.Google Scholar
Vaid, J., & López, B. (2014, Nov.). Informal translation experience facilitates translation verification of idiomatic phrases. Poster, Psychonomics Society, Long Beach, CA.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaid, J., López, B., & Martinez, F. (2015). Linking the figurative to the creative: Bilinguals’ comprehension of metaphors, jokes, and remote associates. In Heredia, R. R. and Cieslicka, A. (Eds.), Bilingual figurative language processing (pp. 53–86) New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaid, J., & Meuter, R. (2016). Not through a glass darkly: Refocusing the psycholinguistic study of bilingualism through a ‘bivocal’ lens. In Cook, V., & Wei, L. (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence (pp. 50–76). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Van Hell, J., & de Groot, A. M. B. (1998). Conceptual representation in bilingual memory: Effects of concreteness and cognate status in word association. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 1 (3), 193–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Villanueva, C. M., & Buriel, R. (2010). Speaking on behalf of Others: A qualitative study of the perceptions and feelings of adolescent Latina language brokers. Journal of Social Issues, 66 (1), 197–210.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, T. B., Chu, A., Vaid, J., & Heredia, R. H. (2005). Divergence and overlap in bilingual concept representations. In Bara, B., Bucciarelli, M., & Barsalou, I. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2342–2346). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Ward, T. B., Kolomyts, Y., Chu, A. H., Vaid, J., & Heredia, R. H. (2009). Graded category structure in Chinese–English bilinguals. The International Journal of Creativity & Problem Solving, 19 (2), 47–59.Google Scholar
Ward, T. B., Patterson, M., Sifonis, C., Dodds, R., & Saunders, K. (2002). Graded category structure and imaginative thought. Memory & Cognition, 30 (2), 199–216.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zinszer, B., Malt, B., Ameel, E., & Li, P. (2014). Native-likeness in second language lexical categorization reflects individual language history and linguistic community norms. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 82–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed