Cross-Language Interaction During Language Production in L1 German-L2 Italian Bilinguals
Open Access
- Author:
- Fowler, Courtney E
- Graduate Program:
- German
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 06, 2017
- Committee Members:
- Carrie Neal Jackson, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Carrie Neal Jackson, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Barry Richard Page Jr., Committee Member
Michael Travis Putnam, Committee Member
Paola Eulalia Dussias, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Linguistics
Bilingualism
German
Italian
South Tyrol
Cross-language interaction - Abstract:
- One of the most interesting facets of bilingual language processing is the fact that bilinguals cannot completely shut off one of their two languages at will, resulting in nearly constant cross-language interaction between a bilingual’s two languages during both comprehension and production. Bilingualism research over the past several decades has explored this interaction in various populations in order to better understand precisely how and when languages interact at different levels of processing. The current dissertation project seeks to add to this body of research by extending what we know about cross-language interaction at the grammatical level during language production. This dissertation presents the results of two picture naming experiments designed to measure the amount of cross-language interaction at the grammatical level in highly proficient L1 German-L2 Italian bilinguals from three different populations. To do this, grammatical gender congruency (i.e., whether a noun belongs to the same gender category in each of the bilingual’s languages or not) of the images to be named was manipulated and naming times were recorded in order to see to what extent the L1 and L2 gender systems influence each other during production. In addition, experimental design and population selection were chosen specifically to directly investigate the influence that speaker-internal and speaker-external factors like language environment, age of L2 acquisition, and experimental context, have on the amount of cross-language interaction experienced by bilinguals under different circumstances. Results showed that not all populations of L1 German-L2 Italian bilinguals experience cross-language interaction at the grammatical level, but those that do, do so regardless of language environment or language context (i.e., whether images were named in isolation or embedded in sentences). Critically, some speaker-external factors, such as language environment and predictability of the image to be named, had no influence on cross-language interaction at the grammatical level, but did influence lexical access within the same tasks with the same speakers. This finding highlights the fact that various levels of processing are not all equally sensitive to the same factors during language production. Additionally, this dissertation underscores the importance of collecting and considering all characteristics, both speaker internal and external, of bilingual speakers when conducting research on cross-language interaction, as different combinations of factors may have a critical impact on whether interaction is present or absent.