Poster B22, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
Lexical factors in confrontation naming among multilinguals with dementia: The effects of frequency, age of acquisition, phonological neighbourhood density, word class, imageability and cognate status
Pernille Hansen1, Hanne Gram Simonsen1;1MultiLing – Center for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan, University of Oslo
All words have inherent properties linked to their form, meaning and usage patterns affecting how easily they are activated. The more often we encounter a word and the more connections it has to other units in our mental lexicon, the more easily it is produced. This paper studies lexical retrieval among seven multilinguals with dementia, investigating the effects of six properties known to influence processing: frequency, subjective age of acquisition, phonological neighbourhood density, word class, imageability and cognate status. Based on previous findings, we may assume that words are easier to retrieve from the mental lexicon the more frequently they are encountered, the earlier they were acquired and the denser their phonological neighbourhoods, that is, the more words that differ from them with one sound only (Luce & Pisoni 1998). Furthermore, nouns are typically retrieved faster than verbs, and words are retrieved more easily the more imageable they are, that is, the more easily they give rise to a mental image (Paivio et al. 1968). Finally, among multilinguals, similarities in form and meaning across languages also facilitate activation. Thus, cognates should be easier to retrieve than non-cognates (Gollan et al. 2007). The participants were seven elderly multilinguals with dementia who had acquired Norwegian as a second language. All seven spoke English, but otherwise, their language backgrounds differed: Two grew up as English monolinguals, whereas the rest acquired multiple languages (including Japanese, Tamil, Urdu, Finnish and an African Creole) from birth or early school years. Data collection was carried out in their home, at the university or in a day care center. For each language in active use, the participants completed a picture-based naming task, consisting of 31 nouns from the Psycholinguistic Assessments of Language Processing in Aphasia (Kay, Lesser & Coltheart 1996), and 31 verbs from the Verb- and Sentence Test (Bastiaanse et al. 2003). The current paper focuses on the results from English and Norwegian, the only two languages the participants had in common. Lexical properties were partly extracted from the two psycholinguistic databases MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart 1981) and Norwegian Words (Lind et al. 2015), and partly established for the current project. For cognate status, a scalar approach was preferred over a dichotomous distinction, following Friel & Kennison (2001). The effects of these six variables were examined through correlation analyses and regression models, using R. Preliminary analyses indicate that while the accuracy on the naming tasks correlated significantly with both frequency and age of acquisition, only frequency was a significant predictor in a regression model including both factors. Imageability was a better predictor than word class, accounting for variability both within and across word classes. The cognate effect appeared to be more complex, some times aiding the retrieval of the target words, but other times leading to the activation of words that do not match the picture in the given language. There were individual differences in the participants’ response patterns, and these will be discussed in light of diagnostic information as well as language history and current use.
Themes: Disorders: Developmental, Multilingualism
Method: Behavioral