Article published In:
The Mental Lexicon: Online-First ArticlesBilingual and monolingual adults’ lexical choice in storytelling
Evidence for the weaker-links hypothesis?
Bilinguals often have a harder time accessing words for production than monolinguals, perhaps because they have
less exposure to words from each language (the weaker-links hypothesis). This research on lexical access mostly comes from studies
of words in isolation. The purpose of the present study was to test whether bilinguals also show greater lexical access
difficulties than monolinguals when telling a story. In the context of a narrative, we predicted that bilinguals would produce
fewer different words and words of higher frequency than monolinguals, in order to make lexical access easier. For the same
reason, we also predicted that bilinguals would use more cognates than monolinguals. English monolinguals, French monolinguals,
and highly proficient French-English bilinguals watched a cartoon and told the story back. We coded the words they used for
frequency and cognate status. In English, the results showed little difference between bilinguals and monolinguals on word
frequency and cognate status. In French, first-language-English bilinguals used higher frequency words than first-language-French
bilinguals. These results support predictions from the weaker-links hypothesis in lexical access for storytelling, albeit only for
French.
Keywords: weaker-links hypothesis, lexical access, bilingualism
Article outline
- This study
- Method
- Materials
- Procedure
- Coding
- Results
- Word frequency
- Word frequency and vocabulary scores
- Discussion
- Acknowledgements
-
References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].
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