Lexical selection in bilingual and monolingual naming

Lexical selection is the process whereby semantic concepts activate and ultimately select a word to be produced in speech. This thesis examined the similarities of bilingual and monolingual lexical selection in naming. Chapter 2 reports three experiments that examined lexical facilitation in the picture-word task. Similar results were found for bilinguals and monolinguals. When bilinguals named in Ll, and monolinguals produced common names, identical distractors (PERRO+perro, DOG+dog) produced facilitation, whereas translations (PERRO+dog) and synonyms (DOG+hound) had no effect. However, when bilinguals named in L2, and monolinguals produced less common synonym names, identical distractors (DOG+dog, HOUND+hound) as well as translations (DOG+perro), and synonyms (HOUND+dog), produced facilitation. Synonyms in monolinguals simulated the effects from translations in bilinguals. Chapter 3 reports four experiments that investigated the role of orthography in the picture-word task in Japanese (and an attempt to simulate this in English using pseudohomophones). The phonological Japanese script Hiragana snowed larger effects than the morphological script Kanji or the alphabetic script Romaji. Chapter 4 reports four experiments that investigated the semantic distance between distractors and targets in the picture- word Stroop tasks. There were no effects from synonyms of target names, and larger interference from more closely than distantly related distractors. Finally, Chapter 5 reports a series of experiments investigating lexical selection using the picture-picture task, which produced disappointing results. The thesis concludes that there are cornmonalities in monolingual and bilingual lexical selection.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo