Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Psycholinguistic Study of Native Language Constraints on Speaking Words in a Second Language

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With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Noriko Hoshino will collect data on spoken production tasks in bilinguals for her doctoral dissertation, under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll. This research will examine the cognitive processes that support bilinguals' ability to correctly choose the language in which they intend to speak. Much of the current research on spoken production in bilinguals has focused on bilinguals whose two languages share the same Roman alphabet. For these bilinguals, the evidence suggests that both languages are active even when the individual intends to speak one language alone. The question in the present research is whether the same parallel activity of the two languages will be observed for bilinguals whose two languages do not share the same script. In a series of six experiments, this issue will be examined by comparing the performance of Japanese-English and Spanish-English bilinguals on three spoken production tasks. One set of experiments uses a speeded picture-naming task to ask whether the phonological facilitation typically observed for same-script bilinguals when pictures have cognate names across languages will also be observed for different-script bilinguals. A second set of experiments investigates the magnitude of interference in picture naming when distractor words in the bilinguals' native language are presented during picture naming in the second language. A third set of experiments examines language switching performance for these two groups of bilinguals. Across the planned experiments, the performance of speakers from these two groups will be compared for bilinguals living in a native-language context vs. those immersed in a second language environment. An additional set of language-independent measures will assess the degree to which the results of these experiments are affected by individual differences in the ability to allocate cognitive resources in planning spoken utterances.This research project has a number of broader implications. It will contribute important foundational knowledge about multilingualism that will inform educational issues in a society in which many learners are faced with the task of acquiring a second language past the earliest stages of childhood. The focus in the proposed research on the linguistic and cognitive factors that influence speech planning will provide crucial new information about how skilled oral proficiency in a second language is accomplished. The research will also contribute to the training of an increasingly diverse group of cognitive scientists by including undergraduate students, many of whom are bilingual themselves, and will foster international scientific collaboration.