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THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: THE IMPORT OF SOCIOCULTURAL CIRCUMSTANCE (PUERTO RICANS; MASSACHUSETTS)
Abstract
This study analyzes the sociocultural and psychological processes involved in the Spanish speaking Puerto Rican child's construction of abstract meaning in the English language and examines how these processes relate to the child's native language reality. Of major interest was the influence of second language learning on both native language memory processes and lexical/semantic relations at differing points in the acquisition process. A sample of fifty-four Puerto Rican (representative of our English language ability levels) and thirteen Anglo fourth-grade students from an urban Massachusetts school district were given oral word association tasks in two different treatment modes. In Treatment I, Puerto Rican subjects responded with either a synonymous or defining response to twenty-four Spanish nouns and twenty-four possible English translation equivalents across two intralanguage and two interlanguage conditions. In Treatment II, six Spanish adjectives and their translation equivalents were orally presented to the same subjects in the context of a sentence. Pictures portraying either a home or school setting were paired with the adjectives and presented simultaneously. Again, there were four conditions. Anglo students received only an English-English condition. Results demonstrate that the influence of native language meaning is especially strong with regard to culturally salient words and occurs regardless of level of English language proficiency. English meaning was also found to affect Spanish words, especially among mainstreamed students. Interlanguage conditions produced more semantic interference than intralanguage conditions yet, for those subjects in an intermediate stage of English proficiency, meaning for words in all conditions was often confused. In the associations to adjectives and pictures, all subjects were more apt to produce Spanish-type responses. The findings suggest that both social context and culture play a dominant role in language acquisition and in semantic organization. A semantic shift accompanies English proficiency; words in the mother tongue take on English meaning. The psychological, sociocultural, and linguistic worlds of the Puerto Rican child appear to be in constant contradiction.
Subject Area
Language arts
Recommended Citation
WALSH, CATHERINE ELIZABETH, "THE CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: THE IMPORT OF SOCIOCULTURAL CIRCUMSTANCE (PUERTO RICANS; MASSACHUSETTS)" (1984). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8410343.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8410343