Date
2013
Department or Program
Psychology
Title of Approved Individual Major
Psychology
Primary Wellesley Thesis Advisor
Jennie Pyers
Additional Advisor(s)
Robin Akert
Additional Advisor
Jeremy Wilmer
Additional Advisor
James Kodera
Abstract
The current study investigated the relationship between age of acquisition (AOA) of a second language and lexical retrieval ability in bilinguals. This study compared the lexical retrieval ability of 30 English monolinguals, 25 early Spanish-English bilinguals (AOA birth to three years), and 17 late Spanish-English bilinguals (AOA four to nine years). Participants completed a picture-naming task in English, a measure of non-verbal intelligence (Cattell Culture Fair Test), and a standardized measure of vocabulary size (PPVT-III). We predicted that both bilingual groups would experience more lexical retrieval difficulty on the picture naming tasks relative to monolinguals but that early bilinguals would experience less difficulty than late bilinguals.