The Cumulative Semantic Interference effect in L2 Italian-Indonesian late bilinguals: Implications from a mixed production-comprehension task.
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2021-03-29
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en
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This study investigated the mechanism of lexical access and selection in bilingual speakers through the analysis of the Cumulative Semantic Interference (CSI) effect, a semantic context effect detected in several speech production tasks. This study aimed to test three hypotheses. First, it is predicted that there is an effect of the ordinal position of trials reflected in a gradual slowing down in the reaction times of the naming latencies. Second, it it is believed that the CSI effect persists across modalities. That is, the two modalities of presentation employed in the study (visual or mixed with auditory stimuli) would show similar naming latencies, and hence, similar effects of ordinal position. Finally, it is assumed that the CSI effect persists across languages despite different modalities of presentation (from auditory L2 stimuli to L1 picture naming). That is, equivalent naming latencies across two unrelated languages lacking cognates (Italian and Indonesian) should be found. Based on these three hypotheses, a revised structure of the Conceptual Accumulation account from Belke (2013) has been proposed in order to provide an additional insight of the architecture of lexical selection in a bilingual context.
To test these hypotheses, a mixed production-comprehension task has been created. This task consisted not only of two modalities of presentation, but also a language alternating condition according to the modality. The task presented 4 items from 36 semantic categories in a continuous fashion. In the first modality of presentation, participants were presented with pictures from a given semantic category, which needed to be named in Italian, while in the second one participants heard words in Indonesian and named pictures in Italian all belonging to the same semantic category, such as ‘animal’.
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