Table Of ContentUniversiteit Antwerpen
Faculteit Letteren en Wijsbegeerte
Departement Taalkunde
HOW TRILINGUALS PROCESS COGNATES
AND INTERLINGUAL HOMOGRAPHS:
THE EFFECTS OF ACTIVATION,
DECISION, AND COGNITIVE CONTROL
HOE TRILINGUALEN COGNATEN
EN INTERLINGUALE HOMOGRAFEN VERWERKEN:
DE EFFECTEN VAN ACTIVATIE,
DECISIE EN COGNITIEVE CONTROLE
Proefschrift voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van doctor
in de Taalkunde aan de Universiteit Antwerpen
te verdedigen door
Ihor Borisovitch Biloushchenko
Promotoren:
Prof dr. Dominiek Sandra
Prof dr. Ton Dijkstra
Antwerpen, 2017
Dedicated to my mother,
who believed in me the most.
Preface
How do you get so far?
Already while at school, I was curious about how brain processes languages and deals with
the variety in different languages. But at that time, I was thinking in primitive words and didn’t
even know that it was psycholinguistics that I was interested in. Through my studies in the
Ukraine in languages, pedagogy and psychology I started out on my journey which took 7
years until I finally found my place in the science. Unfortunately, my initial studies didn’t give
me the possibility to combine different fields into one research, and hence that is why I was
always looking out for new challenges. Sitting on the plane to Europe, I was holding some
copies taken from the handbooks in psychology that described the research of Vygotsky
about Thought and Language. It was all I had access to at that time, but it was my dream to do
research in psycholinguistics.
After a hard struggle to win a place at a Belgian university and finishing a Master study
in Psycholinguistics, I got lucky to finally receive FWO-funding to research visual recognition in
multilinguals.
It is worth mentioning that in my opinion there were different factors that shaped
my scientific view through life, but three of them were especially prominent. The first was
being raised in a bilingual environment. The constant contact with two languages made me
understand that one can utter the same thing differently depending on the environment
and/or person. The second was my relationship to reading, not that I do or don’t like to read
but it costs me more time than the usual person as I believe to think. This is because of my
excitement and deeper focus on the words that sit on the pages. Often I read sentences
multiple times to enjoy the word use and interesting combinations between them. The third
was my life’s passion with creativity. It helped me to dare in science, to try novel and risky
experimental settings. All these three factors supported me during my seven years of research.
You don’t do it alone
Of course, it wouldn’t be possible, or at least it would have taken me much longer to finish
the research without great support. Firstly, the enthusiasm of Dominiek Sandra gave me
confidence and support with his passion for psycholinguistics. The experimental results were
not always satisfying and clear, but Dominiek was always supportive in all the ups and downs
through the years. Although officially Ton Dijkstra came later, he was permanently present in
this research from those early days when only some gloomy items were selected from the
pool of the overlapping lexicons. In flesh, he came also at the right time as when I started to
doubt, who needs this research and whether I don’t just lose my life in doing it, he renewed
the passion by his enthusiasm for the results and the experimental design. Great discussions
with both supervisors helped me to grow in my scientific expertise.
Also the excellent statistical support made this research much stronger in its message.
In particular, Sven De Maeyer, Jarl Kampen and Ardi Roelofs shaped my view on statistical
analyses and the choice of suitable methods. Also, Wim Van der Elst was very helpful in all the
difficult situations when I came to analysing my data.
I
Of course I’m grateful to my friends, relatives and colleagues who were always curious
about my development in this research, and who unintentionally helped me to organise my
findings. For them I learned to formulate the difficult theories in accessible words. Very special
thanks go to Duncan who got lucky to be born in an English speaking country and was very
kind to read through the whole text to find the inconsistencies in the language.
Also, I’m grateful to my jury (Sarah Bernolet, Steven Gillis, Marc Brysbaert and Harald
Baayen) who were always a great example to me of passion for the science. They are very
worthy of my special appreciation for finding the time to read and judge this dissertation and
to be present at the defence.
And last but not least, people (sometimes even friends) who doubt my capacity to finish
a PhD based on decent research. This disbelief motivated me to write my dissertation as good
as I can to prove my expertise and confidence that all the years were not lost for nothing.
Finally
Finally, here is the physical evidence of my dissertation that once seemed so long away in
my dreams and that I can now hold in my hands. This final version went through so many
different revisions accompanied by many enriching discussions. Although this is the final point
in my PhD story, it proposes new ideas and questions for new research in the deep ocean of
psycholinguistics.
II
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
General Introduction 1
1.1 Basic questions in the investigation of bilingual lexical processing 1
1.2 The dawn of lexical processing research in bilinguals 3
1.3 Insights from the processing of cognates and interlingual homographs 5
1.3.1 Why interlingual homographs and cognates are so popular 5
1.3.2. The processing of interlingual homographs 6
1.3.3 The processing of cognates 12
1.4. Effects of cross-language orthographic neighbors and morphological family size 16
1.5 Neuroscientific evidence 18
1.6 Processing bilingual words in monolingual sentence contexts 20
1.7 An explanatory model: BIA+ 21
1.8 The present dissertation 24
CHAPTER 2
Representation of identical cognates: the role of task demands and stimulus
list composition 27
2.1 Introduction 27
2.1.1 The representation of identical cognates 27
2.1.2 The effect of a dominant and a non-dominant language in trilinguals’ L2
processing 29
2.1.3 Stimulus list context and experimental task 30
2.1.4 Contrasting predictions of models proposing shared or multiple representations 31
2.2 Experiment 1: GLDT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates in pure English context 33
2.2.1 Method 33
2.2.2 Results and discussion 35
2.3 Experiment 2: GLDT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates in 38
English-French context 38
2.3.1 Method 38
2.3.2 Results and discussion 39
2.4 Experiment 3: GLDT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates in English-Dutch context 41
2.4.1 Method 41
2.4.2 Results and discussion 41
2.5 Experiment 4: GNGT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates in pure English context 43
2.5.1 Method 43
2.5.2 Results and discussion 43
2.6 Experiment 5: GNGT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates in English-French context 46
2.6.1 Method 46
2.6.2 Results and discussion 46
2.7 Experiment 6: GNGT with L1-L2 and L2-L3 cognates 47
in English-Dutch context 47
2.7.1 Method 47
2.7.2 Results and discussion 48
2.8 General Discussion 49
2.8.1 Activation level: multiple representations 50
2.8.2 Decision level: flexible response criteria 52
2.8.3 Conclusion 56
Appendix: Cognates used in this study. 58
V
Description:my scientific view through life, but three of them were especially prominent. The first was being raised in a bilingual environment. The constant contact with two languages made me understand that one can utter the same thing differently depending on the environment and/or person. The second was my
