Article contents
Evidence for a bimodal bilingual disadvantage in letter fluency*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2016
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.
- Type
- Research Notes
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016
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.
References
- 11
- Cited by