<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation explores the healthcare status, concerns and access of Spanish-speaking, immigrant Latinos who live and work in and around Clinton County, Indiana. The study analyzed the responses of 579 participants who answered questions during 20-minute, door-to-door interviews (80% of which were conducted in Spanish). The study’s sponsor, the Indiana Minority Health Coalition (IMHC), was interested in assessing the health needs of this Latino community because it receives IMHC’s funding for health disparity reduction. IMHC was interested in comparing the results of a previous benchmarking study, conducted a decade earlier, to the 2020 results for the purposes of understanding how successfully programming was being implemented. Between 2010 and 2020, Indiana’s Latino population increased nearly 25%, and the population in Clinton County (where more than half of the school children are now Latino) almost doubled.</p> <p>The study was spearheaded by the Purdue Center for Regional Development in conjunction with the Learning Network of Clinton County, a community-based organization that provides education and training in English and Spanish to adult learners, as well as the Mexican Consulate of Indianapolis that promoted the study among Spanish-speakers and shared the study results. Faculty and staff from the Indiana University School of Medicine at Purdue University served in an advisory capacity with medical students enrolled in West Lafayette’s Latino Concentration Program serving as co-investigators. They were assisted by 10 bilingual (Spanish/English) youth of the community and two adult, bilingual (Spanish/English) Promotores de Salud (community health workers) who were trained and earned their ethical research certifications to participate.</p> <p>The study used a mixed-methods, community-based participatory research approach to survey design, data collection, data analysis, dissemination of results. The findings this study revealed are detailed in the following three journal articles that each concentrate on a component of the project. In addition to its focus on health, the survey asked participants about their education and literacy levels, job satisfaction, and feelings of acceptance in the United States. The study provided insights based on descriptive statistics as well as a set of logistic regression models. </p> <p>Immigrant voices were elevated to build awareness of their healthcare and workforce situation among providers, educators, public policymakers, community organizations, and employers of Latino workers. As this work was both exploratory and comparative in nature, there are implications for healthcare and workplace interventions that could improve equitable outcomes. </p>

The present diploma thesis focuses on the relation of the bilingualism and the cognitive style of field dependence/independence. Its first theoretical chapter deals with the issue of cognitive styles, in particular field dependence/independence, its history, possibilities of testing, namely the Embedded Figures Test and its group and online modifications. The second chapter of the theoretical part provides a characteristics and description of the phenomenon of bilingualism, its classification and a review of selected studies of bilingualism in relation to cognitive abilities and with the concept of field (in)dependence. During the former researches, higher tendency to the field-independence in youth non-adult bilinguals was proved. The purpose of the empirical part of this thesis aims to find, using the Online Group Embedded Figures Test, if the bilinguals still differ in this higher tendency from monolinguals in the adulthood. Based on the sample of 30 adult individual natural bilinguals, whose results in the Online GEFT test were compared to the results of 30 adult monolinguals in the same test, a statistically significant difference was not proved. From this result we can claim, that in adulthood, the difference of the field-independence between bilingual and monolingual population tends to...

Diese Dissertation untersucht Transfereffekte aus der Muttersprache (L1) in der Verarbeitung von grammatischem Genus in der Zweitsprache (L2) bei Spätbilingualen. „Spätbilinguale“ lernen eine Zweitsprache nach der Kindheit, im Gegensatz zu „Frühbilingualen“. Forschungsergebnisse zeigten, dass der L2-Erwerb nach der Kindheit weniger erfolgreich ist als während der Kindheit und dass einige Strukturen, wie z.B. grammatisches Genus, besonders stark von Alterseffekten beeinträchtigt sind. Eine Erklärung für L2-Verarbeitungsschwierigkeiten ist negativer L1-Transfer. Deshalb konzentriert sich diese Dissertation auf L1-Transfereffekte in der Genusverarbeitung. Transfer tritt auf, weil alle Sprachen eines Sprechers aktiviert sind und im Wettbewerb um Selektion stehen. Ein Ziel dieser Dissertation ist, zu beschreiben, welche Faktoren Genustransfer beeinflussen. Für die L2-Genusverarbeitung wurde gezeigt, dass verschiedene Faktoren die Leistung beeinflussen, z.B. die L2-Kompetenz der Probanden, Aufgabenanforderungen und die syntaktische Distanz der übereinstimmenden Elemente. Genustransfer wird durch Faktoren wie Charakteristiken des L1-Genussystems, Transparenz des L2-Genussystems und Formähnlichkeit der Nomen in L1 und L2 beeinflusst. Außerdem könnte Genustransfer von der L2-Kompetenz und der Komplexität des L2-Genussystems abhängen. Es wurden ein behaviorales und ein EKP-Experiment durchgeführt. Genustransfer wurde über verschiedene Sprachpaare mit Genussystemen von unterschiedlicher Komplexität und Transparenz hinweg untersucht. Die experimentellen Aufgaben unterschieden sich bezüglich der Aufgabenanforderungen und syntaktische Strukturen mit unterschiedlicher struktureller Distanz wurden verwendet. Der Leistungsstand der Probanden wurde manipuliert. Anhand meiner Ergebnisse konnte ich identifizieren, welche (Kombination von) Faktoren Genustransfer erhöhen oder verringern und Genustransfer als das Ergebnis eines komplexen Wechselspiels von Faktoren beschreiben. / This thesis investigates first language (L1) transfer effects in second language (L2) grammatical gender processing of late bilinguals. “Late bilinguals” learn an L2 after childhood, in contrast to “early bilinguals”. Research has shown that L2 acquisition after childhood is usually less successful than during childhood and that some aspects of a language are more affected by age than others. One of the structures especially affected is grammatical gender. A possible explanation for L2 processing difficulties in late bilinguals is negative transfer from the L1. Therefore, this thesis focuses on L1 transfer effects in L2 gender processing of late bilinguals. Transfer arises because all languages of a speaker are activated and compete for selection. One aim of this thesis is to describe which (combination of) factors influence L1 gender transfer. Regarding L2 gender processing in general, different factors have been shown to affect performance, e.g., language proficiency of the subjects, task demands, and syntactic distance of the agreeing elements. Gender transfer is affected by factors such as characteristics of the L1 gender system, transparency of the L2 gender system, and form similarities of nouns in L1 and L2 (cognates vs. noncognates). Besides this, gender transfer might be mediated by L2 proficiency and the complexity of the L2 gender system. In this thesis, a behavioral and an ERP experiment were conducted. Gender transfer was investigated across different language pairs with gender systems of varying complexity and transparency. Experimental tasks differed in task demands and syntactic structures with varying agreement distances were used. Language proficiency of subjects was also manipulated. Based on my findings, I was able to identify which factors and which combination of factors increase or decrease gender transfer and to describe gender transfer as the result of a complex interplay of a combination of various factors.

“Linguistic relativity” has been studied for a long time. Many empirical studies have been conducted on cross-linguistic differences to find support for the influence of language on thought. This study proposes viewpoint (defined as the point from which the conceptualizer sees and construes the event) as a cross-linguistic difference, and explores whether the linguistic constraint and preference of subjective/objective construal can affect one’s cognitive activity as viewpoint. As Japanese is a subjectivity-prominent language whereas Swedish is not, data elicited from monolingual adolescences (aged 12-16) in Japan and Sweden were compared. A set of tasks which consisted of non-verbal tasks (scene-visualisation) and verbal tasks (narrative of comic strips) was performed in order to elicit the participants’ viewpoints. The same set of tasks was assigned to simultaneous Swedish-Japanese bilingual adolescences in Sweden. The bilinguals took the set of non-verbal and verbal tasks twice, once in Swedish and once in Japanese. The results demonstrated a clear difference between the monolingual groups both in the non-verbal and verbal tasks. The Japanese monolinguals showed a higher preference for subjective viewpoint. The bilinguals’ viewpoint preference had a tendency to fall between that of monolinguals of both languages. This finding indicates that the bilinguals’ viewpoint preference may be influenced by both languages. This study demonstrates for the first time that the speaker’s viewpoint can be affected not only in verbal tasks but also in non-verbal tasks. The findings suggest that a language may influence the speaker’s way of construing events. It is also implied that the influences from different languages in bilinguals can be bidirectional. However, the influence does not seem to be all or nothing. Regardless of the language, one’s event construal is more or less the same. Nevertheless, the findings indicate that the linguistic subjectivity in a language tends to counteract the universal construal. / Språkrelativitet (Linguistic relativity) har studerats under lång tid. Många empiriska studier har studerat om och i så fall hur språk påverkar tänkandet och eventuella skillnader mellan olika språk. Denna studie föreslår perspektivpreferens för att beskriva ur vilket perspektiv en berättare återger skeenden. Studien utforskar om ett språks lingvistiska begränsningar och preferens för subjektiva/objektiva tolkningar av skeenden påverkar personers kognitiva aktivitet som val av perspektiv. Japanska är ett tydligt subjektivt framträdande språk medan svenskan inte är det. Därför jämfördes data från enspråkiga ungdomar (12-16 år gamla) i Japan och i Sverige. För att klarlägga deltagarnas perspektivpreferens genomfördes två delstudier, dels en icke-verbal studie (en scenvisualisering) och dels en verbal studie (ett återberättande av tecknade serier). Samma delstudier genomfördes också till simultant svensk-japanska tvåspråkiga ungdomar i Sverige. De tvåspråkiga deltagarna gjorde de verbala och icke-verbala delstudierna i två omgångar, en gång på svenska och en gång på japanska. Resultatet visade en klar skillnad mellan de enspråkiga grupperna, både i den icke-verbala och verbala delstudien. De japanska enspråkiga deltagarna visade högre preferens för subjektiva tolkningar. De tvåspråkiga deltagarnas perspektivpreferens hade en tendens att komma mellan de enspråkiga deltagarnas preferenser. Detta indikerar att de tvåspråkigas val av perspektiv påverkades av deras tvåspråkighet. Studien visar för första gången att berättarens val av perspektiv kan påverkas inte bara i verbala uppgifter utan också i icke-verbala uppgifter. Resultaten från studien indikerar att ett språk kan påverka en berättares sätt att tolka händelser, och att påverkan från de olika språken hos tvåspråkiga kan vara dubbelriktad. Oberoende av språk återges skeenden på ett likartat sätt. Studien indikerar emellertid att lingvistisk subjektivitet i ett språk tenderar att motverka ett universellt återgivande av perspektiv.

This dissertation investigates how cognates are organized in the bilingual mental lexicon and examines whether orthography in one language, via phonological representations, influences the processing of cognates and false friends in the other language. In light of the framework of two well-known models of bilingual visual word recognition, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+), the premise is that there is activation from orthography to phonology across a bilingual’s two languages and that this activation is modulated by the degree of orthographic and phonological code overlap. Two objective metrics were used to assess crosslinguistic similarity of Portuguese-English cognates and false friends that were selected for a cross-language lexical decision task with masked priming. Dynamic time warping (DTW), an algorithm that was originally conceived to compare different speech patterns in automatic speech recognition and to measure acoustic similarity between two time-dependent sequences, was used to compute crosslinguistic phonological similarity. The Normalized Levenshtein Distance (NLD), an algorithm that calculates the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions or substitutions required to change one word into another and normalizes the result by their lengths, was used to compute crosslinguistic orthographic similarity. Portuguese-English bilinguals who acquired their second language after reaching puberty, and English functional monolinguals who grew up speaking primarily English were recruited to participate in the experimental task. Based on collected reaction time and accuracy data, mixed-effects models analyses are used to estimate the individual effects of crosslinguistic orthographic, phonological and semantic similarity and the role each of them, along with English proficiency, word frequency and length play in the organization of the Portuguese-English bilingual mental lexicon.