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Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
Edited by Leigh B. Fernandez, Kalliopi Katsika, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz and Shanley E.M. Allen
[Benjamins Current Topics 117] 2021
► pp. 67–97

Bilingual reference production

A cognitive-computational account

| Goethe University of Frankfurt
| Universität zu Köln
| University of Cambridge

We investigate reference production in bilingual children. Based on Kibrik (2011), we analyze the production of referring expressions in discourse in terms of activation of a referent. We propose a novel approach, which calculates activation by taking into account different activation-lending factors and their respective weight. This allows us to compare the activation encoded by referring expressions across languages and groups of speakers, and to run correlational analyses with the speakers’ cognitive profiles. In particular, the study addresses the correlation between activation and lexical processing among bilinguals, based on the distribution of referring expressions in narratives by 20 German-Greek bilingual children, compared to their monolingual peers. We found that bilingual pronouns correspond to a lower activation than monolingual ones. Speed of lexical retrieval is a predictor of the bilingual performance. Our model of analysis accounts for how reference production varies across individuals and which cognitive mechanisms underlie this variation.

Keywords: reference production, activation, under- and over-specific referring expressions
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The study
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials and procedure
      • 2.2.1Narrative elicitation
      • 2.2.2Lexical decision tasks
  • 3.Analysis
    • 3.1Computational analysis of referring expressions
    • 3.2Analysis of the lexical decision task
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Computational analysis of REs
      • 4.1.1Weight of the activation factors across languages and groups of participants
      • 4.1.2Activation of PRONs
      • 4.1.3Activation of DEFDPs
    • 4.2Lexical decision task
      • 4.2.1Lexical decision task in Greek
      • 4.2.2Lexical decision task in German
    • 4.3Correlational analyses
  • 5.Discussion and final remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/bct.117.04tor
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