Hearing & Speech Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2776
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Item AN ANALYSIS OF CODE SWITCHING EVENTS IN TYPICALLY DEVELOPING SPANISH-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN(2020) Guevara, Sandra Stephanie; Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Code-switching (CS) patterns were investigated in language samples of 14 typically-developing Spanish-English bilingual preschool-aged children. CS occurred primarily when the children spoke in Spanish. We investigated code-switched events, vocabulary measures, and disfluencies to better understand if children utilize code-switching to fill in lexical gaps in Spanish, as measured by disfluencies surrounding the code-switch. Results indicate that children’s spoken vocabulary diversity is not related to code-switching frequency, although their receptive vocabulary skills are negatively correlated to proportions of code-switched events. We also found no significant relationship between code-switched events and disfluencies across participants. Findings suggest clinical implications related to best practice for speech-language pathologists when working with bilingual children, as they observe language attrition, and code-switching related to language proficiency and dominance.Item Volitional code switching: Is there a cost?(2018) Wereley, Sophie; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilinguals commonly commingle their languages when speaking among other bilinguals in a process known as code switching (CS). Previous studies have been equivocal on whether CS is cognitively demanding, as measured by a time cost. This study sought to identify and compare time cost in CS across two experimental paradigms: naturalistic conversation and self-paced reading. Eighteen participants of similar linguistic background (English-dominant second language learners of French) were recruited and completed both tasks. Results identified a time cost for CS in the conversation task, but not the self-paced reading task. The data were also analyzed for effect of CS direction (either L1 to L2 or vice versa). In the conversation task only, there was a greater time cost for switching from L1 into L2. These results suggest that, while time cost for CS exists, it is limited to tasks that require selection of lexical and syntactic schemas.Item Investigation of Bilingual Disadvantage in Verb and Noun Retrieval in Mandarin-English Bilinguals(2017) Li, Ran; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The bilingual literature has shown a bilingual disadvantage in spoken language compared to monolinguals. This study first investigated how highly proficient Mandarin-English bilinguals retrieved verbs and nouns compared to monolingual English speakers in a picture-naming task. In order to explain why bilinguals are disadvantaged than monolinguals in language processing, this study examined if it was due to the frequency effect, which was predicted by the “weaker-links”, or if it was due to the translatability effect, as predicted by the cross language interference. Results captured a bilingual effect, a word category effect, and a smaller bilingual disadvantage for verbs than for nouns in lexical retrieval. The bilingual disadvantage could be explained by the “weaker-links” hypothesis, rather than the cross language interference. But the smaller bilingual verb disadvantage could be partially explained by the cross language interference hypothesis. Clinical implications and future research directions were discussed.