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Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 452–472

Chapter 17
Bilinguals’ lexical choice in storytelling

Testing the weaker-links hypothesis

| University of British Columbia
In experimental tasks, bilinguals often have greater difficulty accessing words than monolinguals and greater difficulty in their weaker language than their stronger language, consistent with the weaker-links hypothesis (Gollan et al., 2011). The purpose of the present research is to test whether bilinguals show similar lexical access difficulties in a more ecologically valid context: storytelling. Participants watched a cartoon and told the story back. We coded their every word for corpus frequency. In Study 1, we compared bilinguals with monolinguals. In Study 2, we compared Spanish-English bilinguals with English-Spanish bilinguals. Some of the results were consistent with the weaker-links hypothesis. However, the differences were small. These results raise the possibility that bilinguals have little lexical access difficulty while telling stories.
Keywords: lexical choice, storytelling, weaker-links hypothesis, bilinguals
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overview
    • 2.1Studies testing the weaker-links hypothesis
    • 2.2Cognate effects
    • 2.3Accessing words in the context of telling a story
  • 3.Study 1
    • 3.1Method
      • 3.1.1Materials
      • 3.1.2Procedure
      • 3.1.3Transcription and coding
    • 3.2Results
      • 3.2.1Cognates
    • 3.3Discussion
  • 4.Study 2
    • 4.1Method
      • 4.1.1Procedure
      • 4.1.2Transcription and coding
    • 4.2Results
    • 4.3Discussion
  • 5.General discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.17nic
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