title: Conceptual Representation Changes in Indonesian-English Bilinguals.
abstract: This study investigated conceptual representations changes in bilinguals. Participants were Indonesian-English bilinguals (dominant in Indonesian, with different levels of English proficiency) and a control group composed of English-dominant bilinguals. All completed a gender decision task, in which participants decided whether English words referred to a male or female person or animal. In order to explore conceptual representations, we divided the words into gender-specific and gender-ambiguous words. Gender-specific words were words in which conceptual representations contained gender as a defining feature, in both English and Indonesian (e.g., uncle). In contrast, gender-ambiguous words were words in which gender was a defining feature in English but not a necessary feature in Indonesian (e.g., nephew and niece are both subsumed under the same word, keponakan, in Indonesian). The experiment was conducted exclusively in English. Indonesian-English bilinguals responded faster to gender-specific words than gender-ambiguous words, but the difference was smaller for the most proficient bilinguals. As expected, English-dominant speakers' response latencies were similar across these two types of words. The results suggest that English concepts are dynamic and that proficiency leads to native-like conceptual representations.
authors.affiliation: School of Arts & Social Sciences, James Cook University, 149 Sims Drive, Singapore, 387380, Singapore. andreeh.2014@phdps.smu.edu.sg.|School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, Singapore, 178903, Singapore. andreeh.2014@phdps.smu.edu.sg.
authors.forename: Andree
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hartanto
authors.affiliation: School of Arts & Social Sciences, James Cook University, 149 Sims Drive, Singapore, 387380, Singapore.
authors.forename: Lidia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Suárez
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003210:Concept Formation / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007214:Indonesia; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods*; D012846:Singapore; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Bilingual lexicon; Bilingualism; Conceptual representation; Conceptual restructuring; Translation equivalent