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The roles of study-abroad experience and working-memory capacity in the types of errors made during translation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 November 2004

NATASHA TOKOWICZ ,
ERICA B. MICHAEL  and
JUDITH F. KROLL
NATASHA TOKOWICZ
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology and the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh
ERICA B. MICHAEL
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
JUDITH F. KROLL
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, The Pennsylvania State University
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Abstract

We examined the effects of study-abroad experience (SAE) and working-memory capacity (WMC) on the types of errors made during single-word translation from the first language to the second language, contrasting non-response with meaning errors (i.e. when individuals translate semantically-related words instead of the target word). SAE and WMC interacted; individuals with more SAE and higher WMC made as many meaning as non-response errors, whereas individuals in the other groups made more non-response than meaning errors. We conclude that SAE encourages the use of approximate translations to communicate, but only higher WMC learners can do so because this strategy requires multiple items to be maintained in memory simultaneously. A speech-production model is adapted to capture our results and demonstrate the effects of differential working memory demands on producing correct translations, meaning errors, and non-response errors.

Type
RESEARCH NOTE
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , December 2004 , pp. 255 - 272
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2004

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Footnotes

Natasha Tokowicz (NT), Learning Research and Development Center and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, University of Pittsburgh; Erica B. Michael (EBM), Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University; Judith F. Kroll (JFK), Department of Psychology and Program in Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, The Pennsylvania State University.This research was supported in part by NSF Grants BCS-9905850 and BCS-0111734 and NIMH Grant MH62479 to JFK at The Pennsylvania State University, and from grants to NT from the Leibowitz Fund, The Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University, the grant-in-aid of research program at Sigma Xi, and by a matching fund grant from The Pennsylvania State University Chapter of Sigma Xi. During writing of this manuscript, NT was supported by a National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award (NIH HD42948-01), and EBM was supported by a National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award (NIH HD41307-01). A portion of these data were collected at the Cemanahuac Educational Community. The support and resources of that institution are gratefully acknowledged. We thank Vivian Harvey, Harriet Guerrero-Goff, and Charles Goff for their assistance. We thank Gustavo Perry for his assistance in translating the language history questionnaire into Spanish, and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux for translating the task instructions into Spanish. We thank Emily Barth, Ryan Gilligan, Dayne Grove, Adam Issan, José “Tony” Matamoros, Israel Roling, Heather Shrigley, and Jan Toney for their invaluable research assistance. We also thank Robert DeKeyser, Susan Dunlap, Peter Gianaros, Tamar Gollan, Erik Reichle, Ana Schwartz, Simone Sprenger, and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This paper is based on a presentation at the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism in Tempe, Arizona, in April, 2003.