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- Title
Interlingual Homophone Retrieval in Typical Malayalam-Tamil Bilinguals.
- Authors
BINOE, AMALA P.; SHETTY, ROHILA
- Abstract
Interlingual homophones are words that sound similar but have different meanings in different languages. Unlike interlingual homophones, which have two orthographic representations for each language, interlingual homographs have only one orthographic representation. Bilingualism is the capacity of an individual or the members of a community to utilize two languages effectively. Items have similar pronunciations in different languages. Language may have an impact on how interlingual homophones are processed. The Malayalam and Tamil languages are members of the South Dravidian subgroup of the Dravidian language family which is used by people around the state of Kerala and Tamil Nadu who are also exposed to learning other languages. A multilingual person's use of only one language at a time reveals the separation of their various lexicons. In a lexical-decision task, an interlingual homograph activates target words in both of the bilinguals' languages. Hence arises a need to study the retrieval of the semantics of the perceived interlingual homophone in Malayalam-Tamil bilinguals. Thus, the present study aimed at investigating the interlingual homophone retrieval abilities in normal bilinguals and also investigating the language dominance and its pattern in Malayalam Tamil bilinguals. For the fulfillment of this aim, 40 graduate students further divided into 20 Malayalam natives and 20 Tamil natives with no evident health problem, or any associated illness participated in the present study. A list of 12 paired words (Malayalam and Tamil) was presented to all subjects whose task was to carefully listen to the words and to write the meaning of each word. The responses were then tabulated according to the number of correctly written words with correct meaning in each language by a score of 1 and for the wrong written word with incorrect meaning by a score of 0 and further data was analyzed. Results indicated that the native Malayalam speakers and Tamil speakers performed well in their native languages whereas, during a cross-comparison of data, Malayalam natives responded comparatively better in Tamil word meanings than the Tamil natives' performance for Malayalam word meanings. According to the aforementioned findings, people have a reasonable command of two languages, which are subconsciously activated in both languages, and those in the non-required language are not suppressed.
- Subjects
HOMOPHONES; ORTHOGRAPHY &; spelling; BILINGUALISM; LANGUAGE &; languages; PRONUNCIATION
- Publication
Language in India, 2022, Vol 22, Issue 10, p82
- ISSN
1930-2940
- Publication type
Article