Effects of age of acquisition on the locus of language selection in bilingual speech production
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Date
2009
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UMT Lahore
Abstract
This study explores the locus of language selection during bilingual speech production. More specifically, it investigates whether age of acquisition has any effect on language selectivity and how competition is resolved between languages existing in the mind of a bilingual. For example, when an Urdu-English bilingual is asked to name a picture of a dog in English, at what point does his mind select English and not Urdu as the production language? Two different theories regarding language selection phenomenon are presented: Green’s Inhibitory Control (IC) Model (1986; 1998) and The Concept Selection Hypothesis (La Heij, 2004). Costa and Santesteban (2004) have proposed that both the theories may be correct but may be dependent on proficiency level of the bilingual. They proposed that the IC Model and the Concept Selection Hypothesis can only depict lexical processing of bilinguals with low and high proficiency levels, respectively.
This study reaffirms Costa’s and Santesteban’s claim and investigates whether factors like age of acquisition affect the loci of language selection and competition, in addition to proficiency? In this study, early and late language acquirers participated in two language processing tasks. The first experiment was a word translation task in which participants translated words in their second language (L2) to their mother language (L1). Along with each target word was a distracter item in the form of a picture or word that was semantically related or unrelated to the target. Experiment 2 was a picture naming task in which participants were asked to switch back and forth between their two languages. The results suggest that age of acquisition does not affect the loci of language selection and competition during lexical processing. However, clear evidences were observed in the data that strengthened the belief in which L2 proficiency is a deciding factor in selecting the locus of language selection.