Influence of the Type of Bilingualism on Cognitive Processing of Multicomponent Nominative Units (An Experimental Study)

The article presents the final stage of an experimental study of cognitive processing of Russian binomials by native speakers and bilinguals. A hypothesis was put forward about the influence of the type of bilingualism, as well as the factors of frequency and word order in binomials on the process of their cognitive processing. The hypothesis was tested by an E-prime experiment measuring the reaction time. A group of binomials was taken as a stimulus material. They were ranked by frequency, based on subjective assessments of native speakers and data from the Russian National Corpus (high/low frequency), by the irreversibility score, also based on corpus and subjective data (normal/inverted word order). A total of 60 binomials were used. Thirty high-frequency (frequency range from 3.447 to 0.3 ipm) and 30 low-frequency units (frequency range from 0.2 to 0.007 ipm), all of them with the irreversibility score from 75 to 100, i.e. binomials-freezes, units with a fixed word order. Functional bilinguals, students from China studying at Tomsk universities and having a TORFL level 2 certificate were invited as respondents. A total of 25 people took part in the experiment, 17 women and 8 men aged 20 to 38. 1,751 reactions were obtained, of which 1,322 reactions were analyzed. The results of the functional bilinguals group were compared with those of the natural bilinguals group and the group of native speakers. The following conclusions have been made. In all three groups of respondents, the effect of frequency and word order parameters is found. The following interactions have been revealed: the reaction time increases with decreasing frequency and changing the word order from normal to inverted. However, if in the group of native speakers and Turkic-Russian natural early bilinguals the difference in reaction time for binomials under four conditions is statistically significant, for Chinese-Russian functional bilinguals post hoc tests do not reveal such a difference. In the group of Chinese-Russian bilinguals, the frequency factor turns out to be the main factor in the processing of binomials, and the word order factor does not affect the processing speed, unlike in the other two groups of respondents. It is concluded that natural bilinguals process binomials according to the model of native speakers, while the pattern of processing binomials by artificial bilinguals differs from the model of processing in the other two groups. Thus, confirming the hypothesis put forward, the author states that the factor of the type of bilingualism affects the processing of multicomponent nominative units in bilinguals.

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