The effect of Chinese proficiency in English homonym ambiguity resolution in Singaporean English-Chinese bilinguals

Abstract

This study is based on an English-French study by Brien and Sabourin (2012), using the data from 16 (10 female) English-Chinese bilingual participants of Singaporean Chinese ethnicity, aged 18-25 years. Using a cross-modal on-line sentence judgement task, the experiment looked at homonym ambiguity resolution in these participants. The data replicated results from Brien & Sabourin, with incongruent trials, where audio cues in the L2 primed subjects towards inappropriate meanings of a homonym in L1, generating a longer reaction time compared to congruent trials. This study was conducted on bilinguals of two very different languages, contrasting to the Brien & Sabourin paper, whereby English and French were used. Comparing the data from both studies provides some support for Kroll & Stewart’s Revised Hierarchical Model (hereon RHM) of organization in a bilingual’s mental lexicon. ATTENTION: The Singapore Copyright Act applies to the use of this document. Nanyang Technological University Library