Do bilinguals have different concepts? The case of shape and material in Japanese L2 users of English
By V. Cook, Benedetta Bassetti, Chise Kasai, Miho Sasaki, Jun. A. Takahashi. 2006
105 citations recorded by the source corpus.
An experiment investigated whether Japanese speakers' categorization of objects and substances by shape or material is influenced by acquiring English. Based on Imai and Gentner (1997), subjects were presented with an item such as a cork pyramid and asked to choose between two other items that matched it for shape (plastic pyramid) or for material (piece of cork). The hypotheses were that for simple objects the number of shape-based categorizations would increase according to experience of English and that the preference for shape- and material-based categorizations of Japanese speakers of English would differ from monolingual speakers of both languages. Subjects were 18 adult Japanese users of English who had lived in English-speaking countries between six months and three years (short-stay group), and 18 who had lived in English-speaking countries for three years or more (long-stay group). Both groups achieved above criterion on an English vocabulary test. Results were: both groups preferred material responses for simple objects and substances but not for complex objects, in line with Japanese monolinguals, but the long-stay group showed more shape preference than the short-stay group and also were less different from American monolinguals. These effects of acquiring a second language on categorization have implications for conceptual representation and methodology.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cfc77df21b7a79c96f057164846720c53ea256cb
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- Cognitive representation of colour in bilinguals: The case of Greek blues* (2009, background): “Cook et al. (2006) showed effects of acculturation on the way Japanese–English bilinguals extended the novel name for a target object or substance to a shape or material alternate.”
- Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues* (2010, methodology): “In addition, they were given the Nation vocabulary test which measures vocabulary in English at five levels and can be used as an indicator of overall language proficiency (see, e.g., Athanasopoulos, 2009; Cook et al., 2006).”