A crucial issue in research on bilingualism concerns the nature of mental representations for multiple languages. Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that both languages are activated in parallel and are mutually influenced, even when speakers have to deal with only one language; in other words, bilinguals can never «turn off» the non-target language. This has relevant implications for applied researches about bilingualism, second language acquisition and teaching methodologies. In psycholinguistics, an empirical demonstration of this phenomenon is provided by cross-language similarities. For instance, words from different languages may have the same orthography and same meaning; others may have the same orthography but a different meaning. The former are called interlingual cognates (e.g., the word «idea», which has the same spelling and meaning both in Italian and English), while the latter are defined as interlingual homographs (or false friends, e.g., the English word «come», which in Italian means «how»). Interlingual homographs and cognates have been the most important sources of stimulus materials in studies investigating the bilingual mental lexicon. Through such words, many studies in the last decades have revealed that bilinguals often co-activate word candidates from both languages (see Dijkstra, 2005, for an overview). However, many issues about lexical representation and processing of these words are still debated and also empirical results are often conflicting. In this work, after a brief review of the literature, we present the results of an experimental research conducted on a group of late Italian/English bilinguals, where evidence for co-activation of both languages in bilingual lexical processing are found. The main purpose of the study is to provide a new perspective to disentangle competing accounts of cross-language relations, by taking into accounts some variables, such as word frequency, second language proficiency, etc., which previous studies did not always consider.
Lessico mentale bilingue: rappresentazioni lessicali cross-linguistiche tra italiano e inglese
Azzurra Mancuso;Alessandro Laudanna
2018-01-01
Abstract
A crucial issue in research on bilingualism concerns the nature of mental representations for multiple languages. Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that both languages are activated in parallel and are mutually influenced, even when speakers have to deal with only one language; in other words, bilinguals can never «turn off» the non-target language. This has relevant implications for applied researches about bilingualism, second language acquisition and teaching methodologies. In psycholinguistics, an empirical demonstration of this phenomenon is provided by cross-language similarities. For instance, words from different languages may have the same orthography and same meaning; others may have the same orthography but a different meaning. The former are called interlingual cognates (e.g., the word «idea», which has the same spelling and meaning both in Italian and English), while the latter are defined as interlingual homographs (or false friends, e.g., the English word «come», which in Italian means «how»). Interlingual homographs and cognates have been the most important sources of stimulus materials in studies investigating the bilingual mental lexicon. Through such words, many studies in the last decades have revealed that bilinguals often co-activate word candidates from both languages (see Dijkstra, 2005, for an overview). However, many issues about lexical representation and processing of these words are still debated and also empirical results are often conflicting. In this work, after a brief review of the literature, we present the results of an experimental research conducted on a group of late Italian/English bilinguals, where evidence for co-activation of both languages in bilingual lexical processing are found. The main purpose of the study is to provide a new perspective to disentangle competing accounts of cross-language relations, by taking into accounts some variables, such as word frequency, second language proficiency, etc., which previous studies did not always consider.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
