Bilingual and monolingual adults’ lexical choice in storytelling

Abstract

Abstract Bilinguals often have a harder time accessing words for production than monolinguals, perhaps because they have less exposure to words from each language (the weaker-links hypothesis). This research on lexical access mostly comes from studies of words in isolation. The purpose of the present study was to test whether bilinguals also show greater lexical access difficulties than monolinguals when telling a story. In the context of a narrative, we predicted that bilinguals would produce fewer different words and words of higher frequency than monolinguals, in order to make lexical access easier. For the same reason, we also predicted that bilinguals would use more cognates than monolinguals. English monolinguals, French monolinguals, and highly proficient French-English bilinguals watched a cartoon and told the story back. We coded the words they used for frequency and cognate status. In English, the results showed little difference between bilinguals and monolinguals on word frequency and cognate status. In French, first-language-English bilinguals used higher frequency words than first-language-French bilinguals. These results support predictions from the weaker-links hypothesis in lexical access for storytelling, albeit only for French.