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Inter-lingual homograph letter detection in mixed language text: Persistent missing-letter effects and the effect of language switching*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

SETH N. GREENBERG  and
JEAN SAINT-AUBIN
SETH N. GREENBERG*
Affiliation:
Carleton College
JEAN SAINT-AUBIN
Affiliation:
Université de Moncton
*
Adress for correspondence: Seth Greenberg, Department of Psychology, Carleton College, Northfield, Minn. 55057, USAsgreenbe@carleton.edu, jean.saint-aubin@umoncton.ca
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Abstract

Heretofore, we learned that bilinguals better detected letters in inter-lingual homographs when the context language ascribed a content role to the homograph as compared to a function role. In previous work the target homographs appeared in passages that were of a single language. The present work investigated whether this letter detection pattern would hold if both languages were activated by intermixing languages in a passage. Results suggested that despite intermixing of languages that would excite competing function and content meanings, local sentence context was sufficient to engender a content over function word advantage for inter-lingual homographs that was reminiscent of that obtained with homogenous text.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 111 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a discovery grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and by a grant from the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network (CLLRNet) to Jean Saint-Aubin. We thank Annie Roy-Charland and Mireille Babineau for their assistance in running bilingual subjects and preparing the materials, and Christina Linnerud for running the monolingual subjects.

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