Abstract
Inter-lingual homophones are words that have similar pronunciation but different meanings across languages. The processing of this may vary with languages. Few studies in Indian languages have been attempted (Maitreyee and Goswami in Kannada-Hindi, Rajalekshmi, Kumaraswamy and Rao Hindi-English, Vinodhini and Ramya Tamil-English) in accordance with this. The aim of the present study was to investigate the language of dominance and its pattern in Malayalam –Hindi bilinguals using interlingual homophones. Twenty native speakers of Malayalam and 20 non- native Malayalam speakers participated who were graduate students. A non-standardized list of 20 paired- words was formed as a stimuli. Words belonging to both the languages (Malayalam and Hindi), having the pronunciation but different meaning were selected for the study. The findings of the present study suggested that one can perform better in first language (L1) without the interference of the other (L2) effectively, giving the picture oftwo separate lexicons for both the languages. They show a selective lexical-access (i.e., only one language is stimulated at a time) and this is in accordance with the earlier findings.
Highlights
Semantics is the study of meaning of words, phrases and sentences
Bilingualism is a unique experience to every individual with variability in the amount and quality of exposure to the languages the individual learns, as well as the experiences he or she has using the languages when interacting with others (American Speech and Hearing Association (ASHA), 2004)
From the above table and figure it can be seen that non-native speakers performed better compared to native speakers for Hindi words and statistically ---significant difference (p=.00), which shows that non-native speakers had strong hold on the words
Summary
Semantics is the study of meaning of words, phrases and sentences. The semantic analysis focuses on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what a speaker might want the words to mean. Whereas in Linguistic Semantics it is the conventional meaning being conveyed by the word and sentences of a language. Homophones are words that share the same sound but have different spellings and meanings [26]. Interlingual homographs share spelling but not meaning across languages. Each interlingual homograph has one orthographic representation whereas interlingual homophones have two orthographic representations, one for each language. The processing of interlingual homophones may vary within languages and bilinguals have more difficulty in processing mixed sequences of words than sentences presented only in a single language
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