Language control studies generally and specifically on bilingualism has been studied by many researchers in different disciplines and on many languages. Although Cattell started the psychological research on bilingualism as early as 1887, there are really scarce studies that have exclusively investigated the language control on Arabic bilinguals. This thesis examines two important aspects of bilingual language control: language switching and word translation, which are two situations where bilinguals must be able to "release" inhibition applied to a previously used language. It reports nine experiments that investigate language switching in Arabic- English adult bilinguals in four tasks: object naming, word reading, digit naming, and word (and digit) translation: In each experiment, there were four main conditions: (a) Non-switch L1 (L1-then-L1); (b) Non-switch L2 (L2- then-L2); (c) Switch L1 (L2-theri-L1); and (d) Switch L2 (Ll-then-L2). Language switch costs were found in all experiments, and the magnitudes of these effects varied with the nature of the task: they were larger for naming objects (which are bivalent stimuli) than for reading aloud words and naming digits (which for Arabic-English bilinguals are univalent stimuli), and were larger for translating words and for producing translation equivalent names of a repeated object. However, the switch costs generally were similar for L2-to-L1 and L1-to-L2 switching. The results are interpreted within the inhibitory control model (Green, 1998), but suggest that inhibition is applied "locally" to the lexical representations of competing responses rather than "globally" to a language as a whole.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:702434 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Alasmari, Abdullah |
| Publisher | University of Essex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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