López Belem G, Vaid Jyotsna, Tosun Sümeyra, Rao Chaitra
LLAMA Lab, Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, University of Texas at AustinAustin, TX, United States.
Language and Cognition Laboratory, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M UniversityCollege Station, TX, United States.
Front Psychol. 2017 Sep 25;8:1661. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01661. eCollection 2017.
Previous work has shown that prior experience in language brokering (informal translation) may facilitate the processing of meaning within and across language boundaries. The present investigation examined the influence of brokering on bilinguals' processing of two word collocations with either a literal or a figurative meaning in each language. Proficient Spanish-English bilinguals classified as brokers or non-brokers were asked to judge if adjective+noun phrases presented in each language made sense or not. Phrases with a literal meaning (e.g., ) were interspersed with phrases with a figurative meaning (e.g., ) and non-sensical phrases (e.g., ). It was hypothesized that plausibility judgments would be facilitated for literal relative to figurative meanings in each language but that experience in language brokering would be associated with a more equivalent pattern of responding across languages. These predictions were confirmed. The findings add to the body of empirical work on individual differences in language processing in bilinguals associated with prior language brokering experience.
先前的研究表明，以往的语言中介（非正式翻译）经验可能有助于在语言边界内和跨语言边界处理语义。本研究调查了语言中介对双语者处理每种语言中具有字面意义或比喻意义的两个词搭配的影响。被归类为中介或非中介的熟练西班牙语-英语双语者被要求判断每种语言中呈现的形容词+名词短语是否有意义。具有字面意义的短语（例如， ）与具有比喻意义的短语（例如， ）和无意义的短语（例如， ）穿插出现。研究假设，相对于每种语言中的比喻意义，字面意义的合理性判断会更容易，但语言中介经验会与跨语言更等效的反应模式相关。这些预测得到了证实。这些发现增加了关于与先前语言中介经验相关的双语者语言处理个体差异的实证研究。
