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Revitalizing Endangered Languages

Edited by Justyna Olko & Julia Sallabank

Revitalizing Endangered Languages "This guidebook provides ideas and strategies, as well as some background, to help with the effective revitalization of endangered languages. It covers a broad scope of themes including effective planning, benefits, wellbeing, economic aspects, attitudes and ideologies."


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Academic Paper


Title: Effects of Chinese word structure on object perception in Chinese–English bilinguals: Evidence from an ERP visual oddball paradigm
Author: Xuan Pan
Author: Debra Jared
Linguistic Field: Cognitive Science; Linguistic Theories
Subject Language: Chinese, Mandarin
English
Abstract: Lupyan's (2012) label-feedback hypothesis proposes that linguistic labels affect our conceptual and perceptual representations through top-down feedback. We investigated whether such representations in bilinguals are influenced by labels from both of their languages by examining the effect of Chinese word structure on picture perception in Chinese–English bilinguals. A visual-oddball task with ERP was used. Pictures of four birds were used as standards and deviants. The robin-ostrich pair shared a category cue in their Chinese names (like blackbird in English), and the pigeon-penguin pair did not. In Chinese–English bilinguals who were new to Canada, the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) elicited by deviant stimuli was significantly larger for pairs without category cues than pairs with cues, but, in long-stay bilinguals and English monolinguals, the vMMN was similar for the two pairs. These results demonstrate that object perception is influenced by the labels in both of a bilingual's languages.

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This article appears IN Bilingualism: Language and Cognition Vol. 24, Issue 1, which you can READ on Cambridge's site .

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