Convergence in the Bilingual Lexicon: A Pre-registered Replication of Previous Studies.
Naming patterns of bilinguals have been found to converge and form a new intermediate language system from elements of both the bilinguals' languages. This converged naming pattern differs from the monolingual naming patterns of both a bilingual's languages. We conducted a pre-registered replication study of experiments addressing the question whether there is a convergence between a bilingual's both lexicons. The replication used an enlarged set of stimuli of common household containers, providing generalizability, and more reliable representations of the semantic domain. Both an analysis at the group-level and at the individual level of the correlations between naming patterns reject the two-pattern hypothesis that poses that bilinguals use two monolingual-like naming patterns, one for each of their two languages. However, the results of the original study and the replication comply with the one-pattern hypothesis, which poses that bilinguals converge the naming patterns of their two languages and form a compromise. Since this convergence is only partial the naming pattern in bilinguals corresponds to a moderate version of the one-pattern hypothesis. These findings are further confirmed by a representation of the semantic domain in a multidimensional space and the finding of shorter distances between bilingual category centers than monolingual category centers in this multidimensional space both in the original and in the replication study.
Department of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium.
Anne
A
White
Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA, USA.
Barbara C
BC
Malt
Department of Experimental Psychology, KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium.
Gert
G
Storms
bilingual lexicon; bilingualism; lexical organization; naming; semantic convergence