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Evidence for a bimodal bilingual disadvantage in letter fluency*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2016

MARCEL R. GIEZEN  and
KAREN EMMOREY
MARCEL R. GIEZEN*
Affiliation:
BCBL. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain
KAREN EMMOREY
Affiliation:
School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences, San Diego State University
*
Address for correspondence: Marcel R. Giezen, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2nd floor, 20009 DonostiaSpainm.giezen@bcbl.eu
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Abstract

Many bimodal bilinguals are immersed in a spoken language-dominant environment from an early age and, unlike unimodal bilinguals, do not necessarily divide their language use between languages. Nonetheless, early ASL–English bilinguals retrieved fewer words in a letter fluency task in their dominant language compared to monolingual English speakers with equal vocabulary level. This finding demonstrates that reduced vocabulary size and/or frequency of use cannot completely account for bilingual disadvantages in verbal fluency. Instead, retrieval difficulties likely reflect between-language interference. Furthermore, it suggests that the two languages of bilinguals compete for selection even when they are expressed with distinct articulators.

Keywords

bimodal bilingualismverbal fluencylexical retrievalvocabulary
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 42 - 48
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by Rubicon grant 446-10-022 from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research to Marcel Giezen and NIH grant HD047736 to Karen Emmorey and SDSU. We would like to thank our research participants, and Tamar Gollan, Jennie Pyers, Henrike Blumenfeld, Cindy O'Grady Farnady, Ryan Lepic, Natalie Silance, Laura Branch, Jason Baer, and Stephanie Jacobson for their help with the study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

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