Image Credit: From the BrainPaint Gallery
When a person knows more than one language, how does she select words from just one of these languages for production? When searching for a word to say, does a bilingual consider words from both languages, or is the search focused on just one or the other? Preliminary answers to these questions involved a "language switch" mechanism that would "turn-off" a non-target language (the language not being produced) so that search for words would be constrained to the target language (the language being produced). However, more recent research debates whether a bilingual ever completely shuts-down a language and suggests instead that the focus of search in the process of word selection during bilingual language production can be widened or narrowed depending upon a number of variables including fluency, age of acquisition, and the context within which the bilingual is operating (e.g., are the listeners bilingual?).
During my graduate study at the University of New Mexico, these were the questions I pursued. Recently, a paper discussing my Masters research has been published in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. This research reflects a preliminary investigation into whether the translation of word stimuli could affect the production process in bilinguals. For example, if a bilingual is asked to name a picture of a LEG and they see the word milk, would the translation of milk (i.e., leche) help facilitate picture naming? We found that this facilitation occurred, but mainly when bilinguals were naming in their second language. You can read more about this study by accessing the article Knupsky & Amrhein (2007).
I continued this line of research during my Dissertation work with a series of experiments looking at facilitation with identically related picture-word pairs (LEG and leg) and with picture-word translation pairs (LEG-milk-leche) in a variety of contexts. The results of these experiments replicate the facilitation found in the previous study and a paper from the work is currently under revision for submission. However, I presented this work during a Humanities Lecture Series talk at Allegheny College. The podcast for this talk can be found at Knupsky (2007) and the PowerPoint slides for the talk can be found at Knupsky (2007) Slides.