Bilingual Spoken Word Comprehension: Effects of Sentence Context : A comparison of Norwegian-English bilinguals’ speech recognition in Norwegian and in English as a second language

Abstract

This master thesis is part of a bigger master project aiming to expand our understanding of speech processing. In three sub-projects –speech production, speech comprehension, and word finding –six master students investigated the relationship between an individual’s language background and proficiency and their use of English as a second language. This thesis covers the comprehension part of the study, which investigated Norwegian-English bilinguals’ ability to use sentence contextual information when processing spoken language both in their native Norwegian and in English as a second language, and whether this ability was modulated by aspects of participants’ language background, proficiency, and use.