Convergence in the Bilingual Lexicon: A Pre-registered Replication of Previous Studies

Abstract

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.

Second-language proficiency modulates the brain language control network in bilingual translators: an event-related fMRI study

“…This idea has previously been proposed in the literature (for review, see Abutalebi, 2008) based on Green's convergence hypothesis (Green, 2003), which claims that language representations should converge and the neural differences should disappear as proficiency increases. Indeed, our results are coherent with this hypothesis and confirm that L2 proficiency has a major impact on the neural resources needed to manipulate two languages, in accordance with other studies (e.g., Consonni, Cafiero, Marin, Tettamanti, Iadanza, Fabbro & Perani, 2013;Goral, Naghibolhosseini & Conner, 2013;Bice & Kroll, 2015;White, Malt & Storms, 2016).…”

Time to replicate

“…Replication studies showed that effects in the original studies were overestimated (Tajika et al, 2015). Only 36% of replications in psychological research proved to be statistically significant compared to 97% of the original studies (White et al, 2017). White and co-workers (2017) conclude that reproducibility should be one of the core principles of science.…”

Modeling color naming in bilinguals: Computational mechanisms of crosslinguistic influence

“…Such differences in naming patterns of monolingual vs. bilingual speakers have been observed across a number of languages in many domains, such as color (e.g., Athanasopoulos, 2009;Ervin, 1961;Paramei, D'Orsi, & Menegaz, 2016), household objects (Ameel, Malt, Storms, & Assche, 2009;Malt & Lebkuecher, 2017;Malt, Li, Pavlenko, Zhu, & Ameel, 2015;White, Malt, & Storms, 2017), motion events (Brown & Gullberg, 2011, 2013, emotions (Pavlenko, 2002), and others.…”

“…While there are no studies that empirically test all three accounts against each other, Malt and Lebkuecher (2017) attempted to distinguish between conceptual change and lexical coactivation effects in bilingual naming patterns. Earlier studies used a "free naming" task (Ameel et al, 2009;Ameel, Storms, Malt, & Sloman, 2005;Malt et al, 2015;Pavlenko & Malt, 2011;White et al, 2017), where participants must freely come up with a name for each stimulus object. In such situations, it is not clear whether bilinguals are giving a different name from monolinguals due to a change in their underlying conceptual categories in the domain, or due to activation of an alternative word in their lexicon because of crosslinguistic lexical connections.…”