LangSci Lunch Talk: Alia Lancaster (SLA)
Food and ideas bring people together. Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.
Title: Phonological competition, executive function, and mouse tracking (oh my!): A pilot study
During spoken word recognition, many lexical options are active. Bilinguals are thought to have to manage more lexical options than bilinguals, which may lead to advantages in executive function. Previous visual world studies have demonstrated a relationship between the number of looks to a distractor picture that is phonologically related to the target (e.g., dress-drum) and tasks measuring inhibitory control in bilinguals (e.g., Blumenfeld & Marian, 2007; Marian, Pivneva, & Titone, 2014). This same relationship is only sometimes exhibited in monolinguals (Marian et al., 2014). However, an alternative explanation is that the inhibition recruited by monolinguals during visual world tasks is purely a bottom-up process. The goal of the pilot study is to replicate previous results with a new technique – mouse tracking – and to explore this alternative explanation by including nonword targets. I will introduce mouse tracking as an experimental technique and discuss some preliminary results of a visual world task that includes a lexical decision component. Future directions include using the same task with bilingual participants to investigate a possible causal relationship between lexical and domain-general inhibition.
