Distinguishing languages from dialects: A litmus test using the picture-word interference task

Abstract

Linguists have been working to develop objective criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects for well over half a century. The prevailing view amongst sociolinguists is that no objective criteria can be formulated. The aim of this study is to examine whether language processing can provide insights into this problem by comparing bidialectal behavioural effects to bilingual effects reported in the literature. Previous research has demonstrated that when bilinguals name an object in Lx while simultaneously processing a translation equivalent distractor word in Ly, naming times are sped up relative to an unrelated condition (Costa, Miozzo, & Caramazza, 1999). Using the same methodology, we evaluated whether a comparable facilitation effect arises when the distractor word is a dialectal or register variant of the picture name. Across 5 experiments we found no trace of translation equivalent facilitation. Instead, we repeatedly observed between-dialect and between-register interference, in contrast to the between-language facilitation effect. This behavioural divergence between bilingual vs. bidialectal processing suggests that this paradigm could provide an objective litmus tests for identifying the boundary between dialects and languages.

Language Separation in Bidialectal Speakers: Evidence From Eye Tracking

“…One recent example is Kirk et al ( 2018 ), who showed that speakers of Scottish English performed similar to bilingual speakers in a switching task involving switching between the local dialect and standard English, indicating that at least on a lexical level, bidialectals show similar behavior as bilinguals. However, Melinger ( 2018 ) found no trace of language separation in a Scottish English population in a picture-word interference task. Both of these studies looked for signs of bilingualism in the lexicon.…”

Are similar control processes implemented during single and dual language production? Evidence from switching between speech registers and languages

“…The observed register-switch costs also indicate that lexical representations contain tags for register membership, since language-switch costs are typically explained with mental representations of language membership, such as language tags (e.g., Green, 1998) or language nodes (Grainger, Midgley & Holcomb, 2010). Yet, we note that the only study of speech register processing known to us concluded that register (and dialect) membership are represented differently from language membership (Melinger, 2018). Melinger (2018) found that, in a picture-word interference experiment, distractors belonging to different speech registers (and different dialects) produced interference effects, differently from the facilitation produced by translation-equivalent distractors in the studies of Costa and colleagues (Costa & Caramazza, 1999; Costa, Miozzo & Caramazza, 1999).…”

“…Yet, we note that the only study of speech register processing known to us concluded that register (and dialect) membership are represented differently from language membership (Melinger, 2018). Melinger (2018) found that, in a picture-word interference experiment, distractors belonging to different speech registers (and different dialects) produced interference effects, differently from the facilitation produced by translation-equivalent distractors in the studies of Costa and colleagues (Costa & Caramazza, 1999; Costa, Miozzo & Caramazza, 1999). Due to this conflicting evidence, it is unclear at the moment whether register membership is tagged to lexical entries.…”

(Mis) understanding your native language: Regional accent impedes processing of information status

“…Ultimately, the present results demonstrate that it is possible and necessary for the relatively small fields of research on the acquisition of regional dialects (Nycz, 2013) and processing differences between languages versus dialects (Melinger, 2018) to expand to also consider prosody. They also suggest the need to adapt psycholinguistic models that have overwhelmingly been developed for words and phonemes in research on second language (L2) processing (Keatley, 1992;Fig.…”