This study assesses the usefulness of Marsien-Wilson’s (1989, 1987; Marsien
Wilson & Welsh, 1978) cohort model of spoken (first language) word recognition as a
method of explaining the high-speed, on-line processes involved in recognizing spoken
words while listening to a second language. Two important assumptions of the model
are: 1) syntactic and semantic properties of mental lexical entries can function to-facilitate
spoken word recognition and 2) spoken word recognition is a function of the
frequency of exposure to words in the general language environment. These
assumptions were tested in three functionally defined levels of language proficiency:
Native Speakers of English, Fluent Users of ESL, and Advanced learners of ESL. Their
performance was compared on a reading cloze test and a spoken-word recognition task
in which there were five different levels of contextual richness prior to a target word,
and two levels of word frequency.
The cloze results indicated that the three groups differed in their general English
proficiency. Congruent with the cohort model, there was a significant overall effect of
sentence context and word frequency on recognition latency. Despite the difference in
cloze scores and immersion experience between the two ESL groups, there were no
reliable differences in their recognition latencies or latency profiles across sentence
contexts or across word frequency. There was an interaction of ESL group, word
frequency, and sentence context. This may be due to a reorganization of rules used
during processing or a restructuring of lexical knowledge. There was also an
interesting non-linear relationship between recognition latency and language immersion
time. Spoken word recognition speed decreased in the early immersion experience, and
then increased with further exposure.
There was a significant difference in overall mean recognition latency between
the Native and the ESL speakers, with the ESL subjects responding on average 98 msec
slower than the Native Speakers. However, there were no significant differences in the
way Native Speakers and the ESL subjects used sentence context. In contrast with the
comparison across the sentential contexts, there was a significant difference in the
recognition profiles of the Native English speakers and the ESL subjects across word
frequency.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/8743 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Barbour, Ross Patrick |
| 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 |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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