Chapter 17. Bilinguals’ lexical choice in storytelling

Abstract

In experimental tasks, bilinguals often have greater difficulty accessing words than monolinguals and greater difficulty in their weaker language than their stronger language, consistent with the weaker-links hypothesis (Gollan et al., 2011). The purpose of the present research is to test whether bilinguals show similar lexical access difficulties in a more ecologically valid context: storytelling. Participants watched a cartoon and told the story back. We coded their every word for corpus frequency. In Study 1, we compared bilinguals with monolinguals. In Study 2, we compared Spanish-English bilinguals with English-Spanish bilinguals. Some of the results were consistent with the weaker-links hypothesis. However, the differences were small. These results raise the possibility that bilinguals have little lexical access difficulty while telling stories.