Igenkänning av sammansatta ord på ett främmande språk - En undersökning av känsla för morfologisk struktur hos flerspråkiga talare på svenska och engelska

Författare

Kristoffer Holmquist

Summary, in Swedish

This paper investigates how multilingual speakers may recognize compounds, focusing on the theory that a multilingual recognizes a compound equivalent of a compound faster than a monomorphemic equivalent of a compound. To test this, I administered a translation recognition task to native speakers of Swedish who spoke English as their first L2. The informants were shown the pairs in sequence and either accepted each pair as equivalents or rejected it as such as it was displayed.

The findings show that recognizing a compound equivalent of a compound is significantly faster than recognizing a monomorphemic equivalent of a compound, and that the equivalents having similar structure also results in the informants making fewer errors. This implies that semantically transparent compounds do activate each other cross-linguistically while monomorphemic equivalents are not associated with the original compound in the same way. Comparing the results with my earlier findings, I also find a difference in reaction time and error rate depending on whether informants react to Swedish (L1) or English (L2) equivalents, with recognition of English equivalents of Swedish words being faster and resulting in fewer errors. The results go against the Revised Hierarchical Model of Bilingualism, which predicts the opposite result due to the assumption of stronger conceptual mediation in the L1. My results as well as the results of other studies call this assumption into question.

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