Cross-language influences: translation status affects intraword sense relatedness
- PDF / 490,408 Bytes
- 19 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 82 Downloads / 199 Views
Cross-language influences: translation status affects intraword sense relatedness Tamar Degani & Natasha Tokowicz
# Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2013
Abstract Many words have more than one meaning, and these meanings vary in their degree of relatedness. In the present experiment, we examined whether this degree of relatedness is influenced by whether or not the two meanings share a translation in a bilingual’s other language. Native English speakers with Spanish as a second language (i.e., EnglishSpanish bilinguals) and native Spanish speakers with English as a second language (i.e., Spanish-English bilinguals) were presented with pairs of phrases instantiating different senses of ambiguous English words (e.g., dinner date–expiration date) and were asked to decide whether the two senses were related in meaning. Critically, for some pairs of phrases, a single Spanish translation encompassed both meanings of the ambiguous word (joint-translation condition; e.g., mercado in Spanish refers to both a flea market and the housing market), but for others, each sense corresponded to a different Spanish translation (split-translation condition; e.g., cita in Spanish refers to a dinner date, but fecha refers to an expiration date). The proportions of “yes” (related) responses revealed that, relative to monolingual English speakers, Spanish–English bilinguals consider joint-translation senses to be less related than split-translation senses. These findings exemplify semantic cross-language influences from a first to a second language and reveal the semantic structure of the bilingual lexicon. T. Degani (*) Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel 31905 e-mail: [email protected] N. Tokowicz Departments of Psychology and Linguistics and the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Keywords Bilingualism . Semantic ambiguity . Word sense ambiguity Words are notoriously ambiguous in meaning. A single word can refer to several slightly different referents, or even to completely different referents, in different contexts. The word beam for instance, refers to a wooden beam in the context of carpentry, but to a laser beam in the context of physics. The different senses of words may be more or less related in meaning, and may share many or no semantic features. For instance, both senses of the polysemous word beam encompass a referent with a straight line. In other cases, a word can encompass two unrelated meanings, for which it is more difficult to identify a shared set of semantic features (e.g., the homonym bark, referring to the sound a dog makes or to the outer layer of a tree). Such homonyms are typically thought to have been accidently created in the language, such that two separate lexical entries happen to share form (e.g., Klein & Murphy, 2001, 2002). Words therefore vary in the degree of relatedness of their different nuances of meaning, which we will refer to as intraword sense relatedness.
Data Loading...
