Material Information
- Title:
- LANGUAGE-CHANGE AND LANGUAGE-MIXING IN A PROACTIVE INTERFERENCE TASk
- Physical Description:
- Book
- Language:
- English
- Creator:
- Frances, Candice
- Publisher:
- New College of Florida
- Place of Publication:
- Sarasota, Fla.
- Publication Date:
- 2014
Thesis/Dissertation Information
- Degree:
- Bachelor's ( B.A.)
- Degree Grantor:
- New College of Florida
- Degree Divisions:
- Social Sciences
- Area of Concentration:
- Psychology
Subjects
- Genre:
- bibliography ( marcgt )
theses ( marcgt )
government publication (state, provincial, territorial, dependent) ( marcgt )
born-digital ( sobekcm )
Electronic Thesis or Dissertation
Notes
- Abstract:
- In recent years, there has been an increasing focus on studying bilingualism and how it affects
cognition. Nevertheless, little is known about the role of bilingualism in working memory. In an
attempt to understand the way that language is encoded in memory, the current study focused on the
effects of language-change and language-mixing on proactive interference. Forty Spanish-English
young adult bilinguals participated in the study. Participants were given sets of four lists
composed of words from the same category (e.g., animals) all in one language (Spanish or English)
in the single-language condition, lists in which the first three were in one language (e.g.,
Spanish) and the last in the other (e.g., English) in the language-change condition, and four lists
made up of a combination of both languages (Spanish and English) in the mixed-language condition.
Each individual performed the task in all five conditions (single-language in Spanish,
single-language in English, language-change in Spanish, language-change in English, and
language-mixing with Spanish and English). Words were presented one at a time until the end of a
list, followed by a distractor task, and then by free recall of that list. Participants'
performance improved when they changed language in the language-change condition, as measured by
both higher accuracy and reduced intrusion errors, compared to the single- language condition. In
addition, performance was the same for the language-mixing and single-language conditions with respect to accuracy and intrusion errors. Finally, the
incidence of language errors was very low. A proposed model consistent with these results includes
a common representation of concepts shared between languages which are mostly isolated from each
other, but are activated along with lexical items. Because both the concept and the lexical item
have to be remembered in this task, changing language releases the participants from the
interference of other similar same-language lexical items when participants are using a new
language, but not interference from shared concepts. On the other hand, with language-mixing,
lexical items from both languages as well as concepts need to remain in working-memory.
- Statement of Responsibility:
- by Candice Frances
- Thesis:
- Thesis (B.A.) -- New College of Florida, 2014
- General Note:
- RESTRICTED TO NCF STUDENTS, STAFF, FACULTY, AND ON-CAMPUS USE
- Bibliography:
- Includes bibliographical references.
- General Note:
- This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.
- General Note:
- Faculty Sponsor: Harley, Heidi
Record Information
- Source Institution:
- New College of Florida
- Holding Location:
- New College of Florida
- Rights Management:
- Applicable rights reserved.
- Resource Identifier:
- Classification:
- S.T. 2014 F7
- System ID:
- AA00024740:00001
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