Semantic Convergence in Bilinguals
نویسنده
چکیده
Recent evidence suggests that bilinguals’ lexical mappings for their two languages converge on a common naming pattern. The present paper investigates how semantic convergence affects the category centers and the category boundaries in the two languages of a bilingual. For common household objects, we found that the prototypes for corresponding categories in a bilingual’s two languages were more similar than corresponding monolingual prototypes. Bilingual category boundaries were less complex than monolingual boundaries. The findings can be explained by the diminished language input for bilinguals as compared to monolinguals.
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