Spoken word production in Norwegian-English bilinguals Investigating effects of bilingual profile and articulatory divergence

Abstract

This thesis investigates the effects of individual differences in bilingual profile and articulatory divergence on bilingual spoken word production. During bilingual word production both languages are to some degree active, and control mechanisms are therefore required to produce the intended word. These control mechanisms have been investigated in language switching experiments, and general language proficiency differences have been shown to modulate naming behaviour (e.g., Costa & Santesteban, 2004). The motivation for additionally focusing on individual differences in the domains of phonology and accent in the current study came from observations of cognate effects in word production (e.g., Costa et al., 2000; Hoshino & Kroll, 2008). Cognates are words that share form and meaning across languages and often facilitate word production. Cognate effects have been partly attributed to cross-linguistic phonological similarity, but the degree of similarity between cognates is subject to individual variation. In this thesis the classic psycholinguistic paradigms of picture naming and language switching were used to assess bilingual word production. A variety of measures were employed to assess individual differences in bilingual profile, proficiency, and articulation.