PSYCHOLOGY MASTER'S THESIS ABSTRACT

Geta Cojucar

MA-Research
December 2004

Bilingual Blindspot for Text-Embedded Interlingual Non-Cognate Homographs:  The Interference Effect
of Interlingual Word-Frequency on Recognizing Cross-Contextual Interlingual Homographs

    At the prelexical level, the differential effects of context, priming and instructions on selecting English-Romanian cognate (semantically identical), and non-cognate (semantically unrelated) homographs was studied.  During coherent cross-contextual presentations of infrequent homographs, bilinguals were expected to selectively omit non-cognate homographs unless they were anchored in a monolingual mode, primed with high-frequency homographs, and instructed to identify both homographic categories.  At the conceptual level, participants were expected to misattribute cognate status to non-cognates when asked to segregate words from a homographic list.
    Several 2 x 3 MANOVAs and a 2 x 2 x 3 ANOVA were performed to identify the differential effects of text presentation, frequency of primes, and instructions on the selection of text-embedded cognate and non-cognate homographs.  The main effects obtained indicated that the coherent text presentation imposed a greater blindspot effect for non-cognate homographs in low-frequency primed bilinguals selecting either Romanian words or interlingual homographs, as opposed to bilinguals selecting Romanian words with declared homographic status.  The item analyses provided evidence for source misattribution based on frequent transpositions of L2 partial homographs into L1 mode.  Overall, these results suggest separate access to L1 and L2 lexica for non-cognate homographs, and no-selective access for partial homographs.

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