Semantics and Structure: A Comparison between Monolingual and Bilingual Subjects

Twenty English-speaking monolinguals and 20 French-American bilinguals were given 11 words to encode in order to obtain certain measures of codability: latency, reaction time, number of words, number of syllables, and interpersonal agreement. In addition, the semantic differential was administered in order to obtain an indication of meaning intensity. Although the classical coding measures correlated with each other in expected directions for both groups, intensity of meaning was inversely correlated with the coding measures only for the monolingual group. For the bilinguals, intensity was directly related to the coding measures. The results imply that although coding measures do hold up between groups, they may mean different things. Words that have intense meaning for bilinguals may be those that elicit a host of associations; while for monolinguals, the most semantically intense words elicit few associations.