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Lexical category differences in bilingual picture naming: Implications for models of lexical representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 May 2021

Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah Open the ORCID record for Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah [Opens in a new window] ,
Yanni Kevas  and
Ran Li
Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Yanni Kevas
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
Ran Li
Affiliation:
Boston University, Boston, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences University of Maryland, 7251 Preinkert Drive, College Park, Maryland 20904 USA, Yasmeen Faroqi-Shah, E-mail:yfshah@umd.edu
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Abstract

Bilingual speakers are less accurate and slower than monolinguals in word production. This bilingual cost has been demonstrated primarily for nouns. This study compared verb and noun retrieval to better understand bilingual lexical representation and test alternate hypotheses about bilingual cost. Picture naming speeds from highly proficient English–Spanish bilinguals showed a smaller bilingual cost for verbs compared to nouns. In Experiment 1, picture naming speeds were influenced by name agreement, age-of-acquisition and word length. Additionally, noun (but not verb) naming speed was predicted by word frequency. Experiment 2 examined two potential explanations for the smaller bilingual cost for verbs: verbs experience weaker cross-language interference (measured by translation speed) and smaller frequency effects. Both these predictions were confirmed, showing crucial differences between verbs and nouns and suggesting that cross-language facilitation rather than interference influences bilingual lexical retrieval, and that the frequency lag account of bilingual cost is more applicable to nouns than to verbs. We propose a Bilingual Integrated Grammatical Category model for highly proficient bilinguals to represent lexical category differences.

Keywords

bilingualnounpicture namingtranslationverb

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Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 24 , Issue 5 , November 2021 , pp. 849 - 863
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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