Abstract
This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian–English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referred to a male or female person or animal. In order to explore conceptual representations, we divided the words into gender-specific and gender-ambiguous words. Gender-specific words were words in which conceptual representations contained gender as a defining feature, in both English and Indonesian (e.g., uncle). In contrast, gender-ambiguous words were words in which gender was a defining feature in English but not a necessary feature in Indonesian (e.g., nephew and niece are both subsumed under the same word, keponakan, in Indonesian). The experiment was conducted exclusively in English. Indonesian–English bilinguals responded faster to gender-specific words than gender-ambiguous words, but the difference was smaller for the most proficient bilinguals. As expected, English-dominant speakers’ response latencies were similar across these two types of words. The results suggest that English concepts are dynamic and that proficiency leads to native-like conceptual representations.
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Notes
Items analyses do not control for systematic variability due to individual items (Locker et al. 2007, p. 724). Nonsignificant effects of word type in the analysis by items could be explained by the effects of lexical characteristics within conditions added to the error term. A hierarchical multiple regression was conducted on the items to assess the ability of word type to predict response latencies in the GDT, after controlling for lexical characteristics such as word frequency, orthographic neighborhood size , and familiarity (Step 1), and response accuracy (Step 2), used as an index of word difficulty. Lexical characteristics explained 23.9 % of the variance. After including response accuracy at Step 2, the total variance explained by the model was 58.2 %, \(F(4, 60) = 20.86, p < .001\). Response accuracy explained an additional 34.3 % of the variance in response latencies, F change (1, 60) = 49.15, \(p < .001\). In Step 3, word type was included. The total variance explained by the model as a whole was 61.2 %, \(F(5, 59) = 18.62, p < 001\). Word type explained an additional 3 % of the variance in response latencies, F change (1, 59) = 4.62, \(p = .04\). In the final model, word type (0 = gender-specific; 1 = gender-ambiguous) significantly predicted response latencies, Beta = .18, \(p = .04\), suggesting that the effect of word type could be generalized to items. Note that the analysis by subjects did not take into account variations in lexical characteristics of words within conditions (Locker et al. 2007). Thus, systematic errors due to variations in lexical characteristics within conditions were partialled out.
Like in the Indonesian–English bilinguals, a hierarchical multiple regression analysis by items was conducted to show that the critical manipulation (word type) had no effect in response latencies. Word frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, and familiarity (Step 1), and response accuracy (Step 2) explained 73.9 % of the variance, \(F (4, 60) = 42.47, p < .001\). As expected, word type (Step 3) did not predict response latencies, Beta = .06, \(p = .34\). Word type explained only an additional 0.4 % of the variance, F change (1, 59) = .87, \(p = .36\).
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by Research Grant JCUS007/2014/LAS awarded to the second author by James Cook University, Singapore. We are grateful to Dr. George Jacobs and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript, and to Yvonne Yen for her assistance with data collection and coding
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Hartanto, A., Suárez, L. Conceptual Representation Changes in Indonesian–English Bilinguals. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 1201–1217 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9399-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9399-6