讲座题目：Lexical tone activation in bilingual spoken word recognition
讲座学者：英国格林威治大学 汪昕博士
讲座时间：2017年5月16日（周二）10:00-11:30
讲座地点：浙江大学紫金港校区东5-201（东）
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Abstract：
Bilingual lexical access in the auditory modality is relatively under-researched than the visual modality, esp. with bilinguals whose language pairs are typologically different (e.g., Chinese vs. English). I will discuss a set of RT and eye-tracking data to tap into the mechanism of lexical access in bilingual spoken word recognition. First, two auditory lexical decision tasks were designed to investigate whether both languages are activated when bilinguals are exclusively processing one of their languages. We compared the processing of interlingual homophones and non-interlingual homophones while other features of words are matched: number of syllables and phonemes, phonological neighborhood, and frequency. The results show no difference between monolinguals vs. bilinguals. In the second task, we superimposed Mandarin tones onto the same English words in the same task. Interestingly, the results show a different pattern between bilinguals and monolinguals. That is, bilinguals showed significant delay in responding to inter-lingual homophones. These results demonstrate strong cross-language effects at the supra-segmental level and partially support the language non-selective lexical access mechanism.
Second, using the visual world paradigm, we performed two eyetracking experiments to investigate whether supra-segmental information in a tonal L1 (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) is also activated when bilinguals are exclusively processing a non-tonal L2 (e.g., English). In experiment 1, we presented Mandarin-English bilinguals with target stimuli that were inter-lingual homophones between Mandarin and English (e.g., English bay sounds similar to Mandarin bei4). Critically, competitors directly overlapped with English targets segmentally and supra-segmentally (e.g., bei4) or just segmentally (bei1). In experiment 2, competition was instead mediated via covert translation. For example, for the English target tree, competitors either matched the Mandarin translation equivalent segmentally and supra-segmentally (e.g., shu4) or just segmentally (e.g., shu1). In both experiments, combined segmental and supra-segmental overlap gave rise to differential competitive effects compared to segmental overlap alone. These results suggest lexical tones are activated in bilingual lexical access even when processing a non-tonal language.
Bio：
Dr. Wang, Xin is a Lecturer at the University of Greenwich, London. She received her BA from Beijing Language and Culture University (China), MA and PhD (majored in Second Language Acquisition and minored in Cognitive Science) from the University of Arizona (USA). Then, she was supported by Research Fellowships at Northwestern University (USA) and the University of Oxford (UK). In addition, for a brief period, she was an assistant professor housed in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. Broadly defined, her research interests center on the relationship between language and cognition. In particular, she is interested in how L2 is mentally processed and represented in relation to L1, in order to understand the cognitive architecture of Bilingualism/Multilingualism. For instance, using various experimental paradigms (e.g., priming, eye-tracking, the maze task), her research has addressed issues such as the representational differences between L1 and L2 at the lexical-semantic level, the role of Mandarin tones in bilingual processing, and language control in language switching/code-switching, etc. Her research contributes to bilingual theories that have valuable implications for second/foreign language education. Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, like Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Language Learning, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Frontiers in Psychology: Language Sciences, Neurocase, etc.
外语学院
浙江大学外国语言学及应用语言学研究所
2017年5月8日
