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Color naming in Tsimane'-Spanish bilinguals indicates that differential experience with content domains affects
Saima Malik-Moraleda1,2,3, Manuel Roca4, Edward Gibson5
1Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA. smalikmoraleda@g.harvard.edu.
Scientific Reports
|October 19, 2022
Summary
Bilinguals
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistic Anthropology
Background:
- Bilingual language processing often assumes overall proficiency dictates word access speed.
- An alternative hypothesis suggests proficiency may vary by semantic category within a bilingual's languages.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate lexical access for color terms in Tsimane'-Spanish bilinguals.
- To compare the influence of overall versus category-specific proficiency on word retrieval.
Main Methods:
- A picture naming task involving color and animal terms was administered to 22 Tsimane'-Spanish bilinguals.
- Naming accuracy and speed were recorded for both languages and semantic categories.
Main Results:
- Participants showed equal proficiency in naming animals in both Tsimane' and Spanish.
- Color naming was faster and more accurate in Spanish, except for the three most frequent Tsimane' color terms (white, black, red), which showed equal proficiency.
- This indicates category-specific proficiency influences lexical access.
Conclusions:
- Category-specific proficiency, rather than overall proficiency, appears to be a stronger predictor of lexical access in bilinguals.
- Language processing in bilinguals is nuanced and depends on the specific linguistic domain and item frequency.
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