Resolving Cross-Language Ambiguity: Consequences for Processing and Learning

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Everyday language is filled with ambiguities. For example, the word 'bark' means both the outer part of a tree and the sound a dog makes. Another kind of ambiguity involves near-synonyms, such as the nearly interchangeable words 'couch' and 'sofa'. These ambiguities create demands on language processing because both alternatives may become active during language use, even when only one is relevant to the context. One open question is how ambiguity is resolved during language comprehension and production, a problem that is likely to be magnified for bilinguals. The proposed research investigates questions regarding ambiguity resolution by bilinguals. In particular, this research will examine 'translation ambiguity', which results from a word in one language having more than one translation into another language. Translation ambiguity will be examined both with respect to language comprehension and language production in native English speakers who are learning Spanish as adults in order to test specifically whether the consequences of ambiguity are similar in receptive and productive language use. Accordingly, participants will perform tasks involving "translation production" by seeing a word and translating it aloud into the other language and "translation recognition" by seeing a pair of words and indicating if they are translations of each other. Participants will also perform translation tasks with and without supportive sentence context to determine the extent to which context can help resolve translation ambiguity. Two training paradigms will be evaluated to assess their success at reducing the difficulties associated with learning translation-ambiguous words. Throughout the project, attention will be given to the effects of individual differences in cognitive skill (e.g., working memory) on disruptions due to translation ambiguity. More broadly, the work investigates adult second language learning and processing. The overall goal is to improve training methods for second language learning by adults.