Iconicity in English and Spanish and Its Relation to Lexical Category and Age of Acquisition.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Perry LK
PROVIDER: S-EPMC4560417 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Purpose The study examines the extent of convergence of semantic category members in Spanish-English bilingual children with reference to adults using a semantic fluency task. Method Thirty-seven children with developmental language disorder (DLD), matched pairwise with 37 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7;0-9;11 (years;months), produced items in 7 semantic categories (3 taxonomic and 4 slot-filler) in both Spanish and English. The 10 most frequently produced items for each category by 20 Spanish-English bilingual adults were identified as the most prototypical responses. The top 10 items generated by TD children and children with DLD, in their order of production, were analyzed for the amount of convergence with adults' responses. Results The top 5 items produced by children with DLD showed similar convergence scores as those produced by their TD peers. However, their responses in the 6th to 10th positions showed lower convergence scores than their TD peers. Children's convergence scores were higher for the slot-filler condition compared to taxonomic in both English and Spanish. The convergence scores also significantly differed across the semantic categories. Conclusion The children with DLD show greater convergence on the typical items generated earlier in their word lists than the items generated later. This pattern of convergence and divergence highlights their strengths and weaknesses in the representation of lexical-semantic knowledge for typical versus less typical items. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.8323613.
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Project description:Across languages, age of acquisition (AoA) is a critical psycholinguistic factor in lexical processing, reflecting the influence of learning experience. Early-acquired words tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than late-acquired words. Recently, an integrated view proposed that both the mappings between representations and the construction of semantic representations contribute to AoA effects, thus, predicting larger AoA effects for words with arbitrary mappings between representations as well as for tasks requiring greater semantic processing. We investigated how these predictions generalize to the Chinese language system that differs from alphabetic languages regarding the ease of mappings and semantic involvement in lexical processing. A cross-task investigation of differential psycholinguistic effects was conducted with large character naming and lexical decision datasets to establish the extent to which semantics is involved in the two tasks. We focused on examining the effect sizes of lexical-semantic variables and AoA, and the interaction between AoA and consistency. The results demonstrated that semantics influenced Chinese character naming more than lexical decision, which is in contrast with the findings related to English language, though, critically, AoA effects were more pronounced for character naming than for lexical decision. Additionally, an interaction between AoA and consistency was found in character naming. Our findings provide cross-linguistic evidence supporting the view of multiple origins of AoA effects in the language-processing system.
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