08:30 - 10:00
Wed-B22-Talk VI-
Wed-Talk VI-
Room: B22
Chair/s:
Miriam Gade
In the present symposium, we plan to bring together different perspectives of how language influences goal-directed performance in mostly language unrelated tasks. Language influences are present either because of instructions, automatic reliance on or because of individual preferences. The contributors to this symposium will present work investigating language(s) as an instructional tool, language as help for or hindrance of cognitive flexibility, language(s) as performance-regulating tool in single subject and co-agents’ settings and address measurement of inner speech and its impact on basic cognitive performance. Given the recently revoked interest in the connection
between language, cognition and performance, this symposium aims at bringing together different research endeavours and stipulate discussions and cooperations among involved researchers.
The impact of phonological co-activation on written language switching
Wed-B22-Talk VI-03
Presented by: Tanja C Roembke
Tanja C Roembke, Elena Benini, Andrea M Philipp
RWTH Aachen University
Language switching has mostly been investigated when switching while speaking and not while writing. As a result, written language switching and the factors that may impact it are not well-understood. In a previous study (Roembke et al., under review), we showed that written language switching is highly facilitated for translation-equivalent word pairs that are identical orthographically (i.e., homographs: TIGER/TIGER [English/German]), even though they mismatched in phonology. Thus, switching facilitation might be the result of limited phonological co-activation when writing homographs, since phonology constitutes the only difference between the translations. In this experiment (planned N = 48; data collection ongoing), we investigated this hypothesis more directly by manipulating the extent to which a word’s phonology had to be activated during written picture naming. German-English bilinguals switched between naming pictures of homographs and quasi-homographs in their dominant versus secondary language. Participants responded by typing the word, and simultaneously spoke the same word in the corresponding language (type-and-speak), tapped their tongue (type-and-tongue-tap) or did neither (type-only). We predict that speaking while typing impairs switching performance for homographs as compared to type-only or type-and-tongue-tap, since language-specific phonology is most strongly activated in the type-and-speak condition. If confirmed, this would suggest that switching facilitation when typing homographs might be due to scarce recruiting of phonological representations when typing without speaking.
Keywords: Bilingualism, language switching, phonology, orthography, writing