Content Details | NUML Online Research Repository

Title Effect of Aging & Linguistics Dominance on lexical Retrieval in Urdu-English Bilinguals: A psycholinguistics Study

Author(s) KHIZRA ASLAM

Abstract The shift from local to global world order has inclined people to acquire more than one language. This shift has opened various domains for scholars from different areas of research, which may include linguistics, psychology, anthropology and sociology. The study is based on the exploration of the impact of aging and linguistic dominance on lexical access among bilinguals. It intends to find out whether aging affects lexical recall or not, and whether linguistic dominance in any of the two languages (L1 or L2) affects lexical retrieval in the non-dominant language or not. The theoretical framework for this study is based on the study conducted by Rossi and Diaz (2016) for studying the impact of aging on lexical retrieval. Moreover, this study challenges the work of Sullivan et al. (2018), who claim that the reason behind slower lexical retrieval among bilinguals is the competition account and not the weaker link hypothesis. However, this study uses weaker link hypothesis proposed by Gollan et al. (2007, 2008, 2011) to find out the impact of aging and linguistic dominance on lexical retrieval. The data has been collected from bilinguals having Urdu as their first language (L1) and English as their second language (L2). These participants are further sub-divided into four groups such as: young bilinguals with L1 dominance, old aged bilinguals with L1 dominance, young bilinguals with L2 dominance and old aged bilinguals with L2 dominance. Lexical retrieval is measured using psycholinguistic experiments: Translation Task, and Semantic Written Fluency Task in Urdu and English. Moreover, a comparison has been made between the results of these tasks based on age and linguistic dominance. The scores are measured, and their mean values are calculated. The findings of the study reveal that there is no effect of aging and linguistic dominance on lexical retrieval. The results of the study have important implications for the applied linguists working in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), English Language Teaching (ELT) and bi/multilingualism.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2023-05-22

Subject

Publisher

Contributor(s)

Format

Identifier

Source

Relation

Coverage

Rights