Publications

Abstract

Bilingualism can have widespread cognitive effects. In this article we investigate whether bilingualism might have an effect on adults' abilities to reason about other people's beliefs. In particular, we tested whether bilingual adults might have an advantage over monolingual adults in false-belief reasoning analogous to the advantage that has been observed with bilingual children. Using a traditional false-belief task coupled with an eye-tracking technique, we found that adults in general suffer interference from their own perspective when reasoning about other people's beliefs. However, bilinguals are reliably less susceptible to this egocentric bias than are monolinguals. Moreover, performance on the false-belief task significantly correlated with performance on an executive control task. We argue that bilinguals' early sociolinguistic sensitivity and enhanced executive control may account for their advantage in false-belief reasoning.

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the extent to which the process of lexical interpretation is context dependent. It has been uncontroversially agreed in psycholinguistics that interpretation is always affected by sentential context. The major debate in lexical processing research has revolved around the question of whether initial semantic activation is context sensitive or rather exhaustive, that is, whether the effect of context occurs before or only after the information associated to a concept has been accessed from the mental lexicon. However, within post-lexical access processes, the question of whether the selection of a word's meaning components is guided exclusively by contextual relevance, or whether certain meaning components might be selected context independently, has not been such an important focus of research. I have investigated this question in the two experiments reported in this paper and, moreover, have analysed the role that context-independent information in concepts might play in word interpretation. This analysis differs from previous studies on lexical processing in that it places experimental work in the context of a theoretical model of lexical pragmatics.

Abstract

Various accounts of metaphor interpretation propose that it involves constructing an ad hoc concept on the basis of the concept encoded by the metaphor vehicle (i.e. the expression used for conveying the metaphor). This paper discusses some of the differences between these theories and investigates their main empirical prediction: that metaphor interpretation involves enhancing properties of the metaphor vehicle that are relevant for interpretation, while suppressing those that are irrelevant. This hypothesis was tested in a cross-modal lexical priming study adapted from early studies on lexical ambiguity. The different patterns of suppression of irrelevant meanings observed in disambiguation studies and in the experiment on metaphor reported here are discussed in terms of differences between meaning selection and meaning construction.