Dissertation Defense: Jonathan Robinson Anthony

SDSU/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders 

Announcement of Dissertation Defense

Jonathan Robinson Anthony
Friday, July 29, 2022 at 10:30am
SLHS 204 or via Zoom

Cognate effects in bilinguals with a history of Developmental Language Disorder: Investigating word representation, processing, and metalinguistic awareness 

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) is characterized by a challenge in acquiring and using language. Vocabulary size is impacted, as adults with a history of DLD may experience lexical access delays, with slower form-to-meaning mapping during processing for word recognition. For bilinguals, word representations are stored in an integrated lexicon, and cross lexical interaction influences word identification dynamics. Evidence of crosslexical facilitation is found in cognate effects, whereby translation equivalents that share similar form are more accurately and quickly than those with little to no overlap. Whether crosslecixal processing dynamics are disrupted by DLD remains an open question. Thus, this current dissertation investigates the intersection of DLS and word representation/processing within a bilingual model for word recognition. Findings suggest that language differences between adult bilinguals with and without a history of DLD may be limited to aspects of word knowledge and processing, with similar metalinguistic strategies for word recognition.