Pre-EuroCogSci 07 Seminar
Date: |
11 May 2007 |
Location: |
AS6-03-33 (2-3.30pm) |
The following talks will be orally presented at EuroCogSci 2007, the Second European Cognitive Science Conference, which will be held from May 23-27, 2007, in Delphi, Greece. All are welcome for this trial run.
The Bilingual Phono-translation Effect:
Facilitation or Inhibition Depends on Second-language Proficiency
by
Winston D. Goh & Meijie Chen
National University of Singapore
Abstract
A picture-word interference experiment was conducted to investigate whether the phono-translation effect depends on the second-language proficiency level of bilingual speakers. English-Chinese bilinguals of varying L2 proficiency were asked to name pictures in their L1 (English) and L2 (Chinese), while being primed with auditory distracters in the other language. Highly-proficient bilinguals took longer to name pictures in L2 (e.g. qiao2, ‘bridge’ in English) when it was presented together with a distracter that was phonologically-related to its L1 translation-equivalent (e.g. breech), than when it was presented with a phonologically-unrelated distractor (e.g. flat), which replicates the phono-translation interference effect. However, an opposite facilitation effect was found with less-proficient bilinguals. No evidence of phono-translation effects on L1-picture naming was found. The pattern of opposing effects is consistent with a lexical-mediation account of L2 word retrieval in less proficient bilinguals.
Are Long Words Holistically Processed?
De-individuation Effects of Embedded CVC Clusters
by
Lile Jia & Winston D. Goh
National University of Singapore
Abstract
Previous literature has shown that long words provide a stronger lexical context in speech perception. We investigated whether this was because long words are processed in a more holistic way. Vitevitch and Luce (1998) demonstrated that when processing consonant–vowel- consonant (CVC) clusters, sub-lexical phonotactic probability has a facilitatory effect on the processing of nonwords, whereas lexical neighbourhood density has an inhibitory effect on the processing of words. In the current study, we replicated these findings when the CVCs were embedded in disyllabic nonwords. However, when the CVCs were processed as part of disyllabic words, both effects disappeared. These results indicate that the constituent components within long words were “de-individuated” and lost some of their respective characteristics, suggesting that long words were holistically processed. This finding favours the interactive account of speech perception such as TRACE, which has built-in inter-level positive feedback loops.
About the speakers:
Winston Goh graduated from Indiana University at Bloomington with a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Psychology. He is currently an Assistant Professor at NUS and is the director of the Memory & Speech Lab in the Psychology Department. His research interests include memory, psycholinguistics, speech perception and spoken word recognition.
Jia Lile is completing his honours year in the NUS Psychology Department and is also a scholar in the University Scholar's Programme. He has been placed on the Dean's List 4 times during his undergraduate studies. His research interests include cognitive psychology and social cognition.
Chen Meijie graduated with a 2nd upper class honours degree in Psychology from NUS. She is currently at Purdue University pursuing a masters degree in Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences.
