Master of Science / Department of Psychology / Richard J. Harris / The present study examined the effects of discourse context information on English Monolinguals' and Spanish-English Bilinguals' ability to 1) translate Spanish and Finnish vocabulary words and 2) comprehend inferential and factual comprehension questions based on language-mixed prose. Language-mixed (i.e., codeswitched) prose varied in the number of foreign words presented in each sentence (i.e., 0, 1, 2, or 3 words per sentence). Results indicated that Monolinguals and Bilinguals' ability to translate Finnish words from pre-test to post-test increased due to their use of contextual information as an aid in translation. Furthermore, Monolinguals' translation accuracy increased from pre-test to post-test when tested on Spanish vocabulary words, but Bilinguals' translation difference scores did not increase from pre-test to post-test, due to their high prior knowledge of Spanish. Monolinguals and Bilinguals' comprehension accuracy was high throughout all conditions, even when tested on material conveyed by Finnish and Spanish words. Results from the study suggest that the use of language-mixed prose does not necessarily impair comprehension or translation ability for Monolinguals or Bilinguals, but in fact provides the context to help translate foreign vocabulary words and draw pragmatic inferences and factual information from text. The findings from this study are of importance in suggesting that, through the use of written contextual information, it is possible to learn basic foreign language vocabulary. Implications for foreign language learning, language-mixing as a mode of communication, and models of language acquisition and lexical access are discussed.

This thesis is an investigation of case morphology in a mixed language, Gurindji Kriol. Gurindji Kriol is spoken by the Gurindji people in northern Australia. It fuses Gurindji, which is a member of the Ngumpin-Yapa subgroup of the Pama-Nyungan family, with Kriol, which is an English-lexifier creole spoken across the north of Australia. Gurindji Kriol exhibits a structural split between the NP and VP systems, but is lexically quite mixed. Kriol provides much of the verbal grammar including tense and mood auxiliaries, and transitive, aspect and derivational morphology. Most of the NP structure is of Gurindji origin including case and derivational morphology. Lexically, nominals and verbs are derived from both source languages. In form, the various sub-systems of Gurindji Kriol bear a close resemblance to their source languages. However contact and competition between Gurindji and Kriol in the process of the formation of the mixed language has altered the function and distribution of these systems, including the Gurindji-derived case morphology. The aim of this thesis is three-fold: (i) to provide the first detailed socio-historical and grammatical description of Gurindji Kriol (§2 and §A1), (ii) to propose a path by which Gurindji case morphology was incorporated into the Gurindji Kriol clause (§3-§5), and (iii) to demonstrate changes in the use of four case markers quantitatively (§6-§9).