Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Cross-language activation

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    THE CROSS-LANGUAGE ACTIVATION OF FIRST LANGUAGE (L1) HOMONYMS TRANSLATIONS IN SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) PROCESSING: AN INVESTIGATION OF WHETHER L1 TRANSLATION ARE ACTIVATED IN L2 SENTENCE CONTEXT
    (2024) Alsalmi, Mona Othman; Jiang, Nan; Second Language Acquisition and Application; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A present study aimed to investigate the role of a first language (L1) translation on a second language (L2) word processing in a sentential context by relatively advanced Arabic learners of English. The focus is on cases where a homonymous word in the L1 is realized by independent words in the L2, (e.g. Arabic قرش realized by English shark and coin). Using the visual-world paradigm, Arabic-English bilinguals and English native participants were auditorily presented with English sentences that are predictive of a target word (e.g., “shark” in Scuba divers saw the sharp teeth of a giant shark yesterday) while looking at a visual screen. The screen contained one of the three critical objects: a target object whose English name corresponded to the target word (shark; Arabic: قرش) in the target condition, an Arabic competitor object whose Arabic name shared the same Arabic translation with the target word (coin; Arabic: قرش) in the Arabic condition, or an object that was unrelated to the target word (drums; Arabic طبل) in the control condition.Compared to native speakers of English, relatively advanced Saudi learners of English made more fixations on the critical objects in the Arabic condition compared to the control condition. This study supports the potential automatic activation of L1 translations when processing sentences in L2, even in relatively proficient learners and suggests evidence for the verification model in L2 word recognition.
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    PROCESSING OF COMPOUND WORDS BY ADULT KOREAN-ENGLISH BILINGUALS
    (2011) Ko, In Yeong; Wang, Min; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The purpose of this dissertation study is to investigate how Korean-English bilinguals process compound words in both English and Korean. The major research question is: when Korean-English bilinguals process Korean or English compound words, what information is used to segment compound words into their constituents and, in particular, does morphological information play an independent role irrelevant to the form and semantic information? Four masked priming experiments were conducted with adult Korean-English bilinguals. Compound words (e.g., bedroom, deadline) and monomorphemic words with a compound-like structure (e.g., hammock) served as targets and were preceded by brief masked primes corresponding to the constituent of the target stimulus (e.g., bed, room, dead, and mock). In Experiments 1 and 2, within-language prime-target pairs (Korean-Korean for Experiment 1 and English-English for Experiment 2), co-varying morphological decomposability, semantic and form relatedness were presented. In Experiments 3 and 4, cross-language prime-target pairs (Korean-English for Experiment 3 and English-Korean for Experiment 4), varying morphological decomposability, semantic and phonological form relatedness were presented. In Experiment 1, results showed that morphological information plays a role independent of the form information when Korean-English bilinguals decompose compound words into their individual constituent morphemes in their L1 (Korean). In Experiment 2, however, there was no significant priming effect in all conditions, indicating that morphological decomposition is not relied upon in their L2 (English) processing. In Experiment 3, morphological information plays an independent role in the early stage of cross-language activation irrelevant to the semantic factor at the prime duration of 36 ms. However, morphological decomposition is constrained by semantic transparency in the later stage of cross-language activation at the prime duration of 48 ms and 100 ms. There was no significant priming effect at the two short prime durations (both 36 ms and 48 ms). However, there was a marginally significant priming effect in the +M+S-P condition at the longest prime duration (100 ms) in Experiment 3. Based on the pattern of these results, it seems that at the earlier stage of processing, phonological relatedness was important for morphological processing. In Experiment 4, there were no significant priming effects in all conditions across all of the prime durations. These findings together point to a clear asymmetry in the masked cross-language priming between L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions.