Five tachistoscopic studies were conducted to investigate patterns of hemispheric specialization for different types of word pair comparisons among monolinguals and fluent bilingual adults. Bilinguals were further grouped as "early" or "late" depending on whether their second language was acquired in infancy or in adolescence. All groups were faster at making orthographic comparisons for left visual field input but were faster in the right visual field for phonological and syntactic judgments. Semantic comparisons yielded no visual field asymmetries for monolinguals or late bilinguals but yielded a left visual field superiority for early bilinguals. Group differences in response strategy were also noted whereby early bilinguals favoured semantic processing and late bilinguals surface processing. The results are interpreted to suggest that lateralization patterns are primarily influenced by task-related processing demands but that early versus late onset of bilingualism predisposes the use of different processing strategies for performing a particular task.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.68634 |
| Date | January 1981 |
| Creators | Vaid, Jyotsna |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Psychology) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000138722, proquestno: AAINK58165, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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