Sadat, J. 1, 2 , Martin, C. 1 , Alario, F. 2 & Costa, A. 1, 3
1 Department of Information and Communication Technologies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
2 Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université
3 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)
Previous research has shown that bilinguals suffer certain costs in linguistic tasks when compared to monolingual speakers. To clarify the origin of this phenomenon, we are currently conducting an empirical investigation of the variables that modulate this so-called bilingual disadvantage. In a large-scale picture naming study, the onset latencies for 533 object drawings were collected from early highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals. Participants were asked to name individual object drawings in Spanish as fast and accurately as possible. The entire picture set was presented twice. Various multiple regression analyses were conducted on the naming latencies. Measures of Spanish vocabulary size, language usage, socio-economic status and executive control capacities were obtained for each participant, and were used as participant-related predictors. Continuous measures of lexical frequency, cognate status and age-of-acquisition for each picture name were used as item-related predictors. In this poster, we present preliminary findings of this study, and discuss how the complete results will help clarifying 1) the effects that participant-related predictors have on the bilingual disadvantage, as well as 2) the inter-relationship between lexical frequency and cognate status in the bilingual lexicon.