Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Psychology, Committee on Human Development, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1982. / Also available in print.

Code-switching is a common feature of bilingual language use and has multiple factors that influence the frequency and type of code-switching. 56 Spanish-English bilingual children recorded sessions of Spanish-designated and English-designated interactions with a caregiver at 2.5 and 3.5 years. These sessions were transcribed and coded for all code-switched utterances. At both ages, we found: (1) Children switched to English more frequently than they switched to Spanish. (2) Their degree of English dominance was a positive predictor of their frequency of switching to English, but a negative predictor of their frequency of switching to Spanish. Between 2.5 and 3.5 years, children became more English dominant, and their rate of switching to English increased while their rate of switching to Spanish decreased. The present findings suggest that the strongest influence on bilingual children’s code-switching is their relative proficiency in their two languages and as that proficiency changes, their code-switching changes. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The evolution of the concept of language interference and how it has been instructionally applied to Spanish English Chicano children in the United States was the central thesis of this work. The study attempted to answer the following questions: (1) What does language interference mean? (2) How is it used? and (3) Why is it used in teaching English to Spanish speaking Chicano students in the United States? The study revealed that: (1) Two implicit paradigms, the languages as habit formation and the languages in contact, explained the meaning of language interference. (2) The guiding assumption operating under the language as habit formation paradigm had never been examined; thus, the wide acceptance of the habit formation theory, which defined interference as differences between two languages causing difficulty and interference. (3) The unexamined assumption in the habit formation paradigm when examined with twelve Spanish English bilingual children in grades 2, 4, and 6 was not valid; thus its instruction practices regarding language learning and language teaching are not valid. (4) Given the new knowledge about language learning and teaching (applied sociolinguistics and applied psycholinguistics), the definition of language interference had to be expanded and redefined; thus a new paradigm emerged--languages in communicative use--but its unexamined assumptions need to be examined now. (5) The wide acceptance of the habit formation definition of language interference was due to racism, prejudice, and elitism in intellectual guise. (6) Given that the habit formation definition of language interference is valid, then changing teachers' perceptions, attitudes, and understanding about language learning and teaching, and bilingualism would necessitate a demythification process. This study was a descriptive, theoretical, and epistemological examination of a phenomena that occurs when two languages are used to communicate. How reality is described depends on one's governing gaze, operating assumptions (both implicit and explicit), logic of reasoning, and theory building. If a theory is built on an unexamined assumption, i.e., has never been tested with reality, then its perpetuation builds an illusion, a myth that people try to make real. The construction and description of reality are challenging tasks in any field of study.

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It has been demonstrated that in early visual word processing, monolingual speakers process morphologically complex words in terms of their constituent morphemes (e.g., hunt+er), irrespective of the semantic relationship between stem and suffix (e.g., corn+er) (e.g., Longtin, Segui, & Halle, 2003; Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). However, research into bilingual morphological processing has produced support for and against the notion that bilinguals process morphologically complex words akin to monolingual speakers (Clahsen, Felser, Neubauer, Sato, & Silva, 2010; Diependaele, Dufiabeitia, Morris, & Keuleers, 2011). The experiments in this work explored the nature of bilingual morphological processing in early visual word recognition, by means of masked priming. Using prime target pairs sharing a morphological a nd semantic (e.g., hunter-hunt), only a pseudo-morphological (e.g., corner-corn), and neither morphological nor semantic relationship (e.g., yellow-yell), Experiments 1 and 2 explored morphological priming in English for English L1 - German L2 and German L1 - English L2 speakers, respectively. The design was expanded to German, testing bilingual German L1 and L2 speakers in Experiments 3 and 4. Results showed similar trends with consistent priming across all conditions for bilingual English L1 and L2 speakers, but different priming magnitudes for bilingual German L1 and L2 speakers. Using primes ranging from very low to very high frequencies, the relative contribution of prime frequency with respect to these findings was explored first for native English speakers in Experiment 5, and expanded to English L2 speakers in Experiment 6. Although prime frequency affected reaction latencies in both monolingual and bilingual speakers, Experiment 7, a re-test of Experiment 1 with monolingual speakers with no knowledge of a foreign language, indicated that it may be the sound command of another language that influences morphological processing in the participants' native language. The results are discussed in relation to the current literature and models of bilingual word processing.

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While studies suggest that figurative, or non-literal, meanings are automatically activated in single language users, little is known about how language proficiency may influence the automaticity of non-literal meaning activation. The present research sought to address this issue by comparing figurative language activation in Spanish-English bilinguals. An interference paradigm (Glucksberg, Gildea & Bookin, 1982) was used in which participants were to judge the literal truth or falsity of statements of the form Some Xs are Ys. Judgments on this task are typically slower to statements that, though literally false, are metaphorically true (e.g., Some lawyers are sharks), suggesting that metaphorical meanings are non-optionally activated (at least in single language users). The present research involved four experiments: Experiment 1 conducted with English-speaking monolinguals, replicated the metaphor interference effect; in Experiment 2 the effect was replicated in English-dominant and in balanced bilinguals tested only in English. Experiment 3 conducted with bilinguals tested in both languages, showed that the metaphor interference effect was not obtained in either language in English-dominant bilinguals and was obtained in Spanish only in the balanced group. The findings from Experiments 1 and 2 support the view that nonliteral (metaphoric) meanings are automatically accessed in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. Experiment 3 involved a fewer number of metaphor trials per language, raising the possibility that this procedural difference may have led to a weakening of the metaphor interference effect. This possibility was directly tested in Experiment 4, conducted with English-speaking monolinguals presented with the same number of metaphor trials as the bilinguals in Experiment 3. The results showed a clear metaphor interference, even with the reduced number of trials. As such, the findings of Experiment 3, where a metaphor interference effect was obtained only for Spanish items, are somewhat equivocal: at face value, they suggest that the effect is modulated by language proficiency. Alternatively, the metaphor interference effect may turn out to be present in both languages, but may simply have been obscured by variability owing to the small sample size per language order. Which of these two interpretations turns out to be valid will depend on additional testing. Implications of the present findings for theories of the organization of the bilingual representational system are addressed.