R ESEARCH D ESIGN AND M ETHODOLOGY
3.5 Phase One: Pilot Study
3.5.1 Data Collection
As already mentioned, the pilot study was primarily envisaged to make an assessment whether the main study would be feasible in its entirety. Further it also aimed to therewith generate the requisite data for making sample size calculations, particularly necessitated by the absence of precedent studies providing an insight into the same. The next section aims to clearly underline the eligibility criterion selected for participations, and also delve into the physical settings, locales included, pertaining to the data collection part of the pilot study.
3.5.1.1 Method
Participants and Locations.
A total of forty Bodo−Assamese bilinguals participated in the pilot study. These participants were recruited from four locations in Guwahati, Assam: (1) Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, (2) Gauhati University, (3) Cotton College, and (4) Pandu College (see Appendix A). The same participants took part in all four pilot experiments. Out of the forty participants, twenty-two were male and eighteen were female. They ranged in age from 21 to 38 years (mean age = 25.5, SD = 4.60). Participants were native speakers of Bodo (L1) with Assamese as their second language (L2), living in an L2 dominant environment.All participants were right handed and performed the tasks with the dominant hand.
They completed a questionnaire which included questions on their language history and usage. In the questionnaire, participants provided self-report ratings of age of acquisition and proficiency for Bodo and Assamese, on the basis of which they were sorted into three groups: Early High Proficient, Late High Proficient, and Late Low Proficient bilinguals. The summarized data of the self-report ratings is presented in Table 3.1. In Table 3.1 it can be noted that, on all four proficiency measures the ratings of the high proficient group are higher than the low proficient group.
Moreover, for the low proficient groups, the scores are significantly higher in case of Bodo than Assamese.
Table 3.1 Self-Report Ratings in Bodo and Assamese for All Three Bilingual Groups
Bodo (L1) Assamese (L2)
Early (n = 17)
Late High (n = 10)
Late Low (n = 13)
Early (n = 17)
Late High (n = 10)
Late Low (n = 13)
Age of acquisition (years) 2.4 2.9 1.5 3.2 9.2 10.6
Mean daily usage (%) 47.8 % 46.2 % 47.9 % 31.4 % 21.2 % 19 % Self-ratings (7 point scale)
Speaking 6.8
(1.0)
6.8 (0)
6.6 (0.7)
6 (0.8)
6 (0.7)
3.8 (0)
Reading 6.8
(0.8)
6.8 (0)
6.3 (0)
6 (0.8)
6 (0.7)
3.1 (0.7)
Writing 6.8
(0.8)
6.8 (0)
6.4 (0.7)
5.3 (2.6)
4.2 (0.7)
1.5 (0)
Comprehension 6.7
(1.4)
6.4 (0)
6.3 (2.1)
5.3 (2.6)
4.6 (1.4)
2.8 (0)
In addition to AoA and proficiency in the two languages, another constraint, i.e., language dominance, for measuring the frequency of usage of the two languages was also administered. Participants rated the regularity in which they use each of the languages with different people and in different social and academic contexts. The self-report measures revealed that, Bodo is dominantly used with parents and siblings and less used with friends and co-workers. On the other hand, Assamese is more frequently used with friends and co-workers. Moreover, the self-ratings also gave an estimate of different activities done in Bodo and Assamese. It has been seen that speaking and listening is mostly done in Assamese whereas reading and writing in Bodo. These three groups took part in the priming experiments. The core question as to whether Early and Late (across High and Low proficiency spectrum) learners demonstrate similar priming effects has to be addressed, and the pattern of results would showcase an empirical evidence establishing the nature of effect of age of acquisition of second language, and proficiency thereof, on the construct of the language representation and processing system of the bilingual.
Stimuli and Design.
The stimuli consisted of fifty non-cognate translation equivalents representing six semantic categories (fruits, vegetables, birds, animals, body parts, and natural objects). Each target was preceded once by a non-cognate translation prime and the other time by an unrelated control prime. None of the unrelated prime-target word pairs were morphologically or semantically related (see Appendix F). In addition to that, fifty orthographically legal and pronounceable nonword targets in Assamese and Bodo were generated by replacing letters of the word targets, while keeping a similar structure and maintaining pronounceability.The nonword targets were preceded by the translation primes and unrelated primes used for the word targets. The stimuli list was randomized. The stimuli remained the same for all four pilot experiments. Table 3.2 illustrates one set of stimulus in order to depict the experimentations.
Table 3.2 Examples of a Stimulus Set Used in Experiment 1
Word Nonword
Prime Type Prime Target Prime Target
Translation सैमा‘dog’ kk‘dog’ सैमा k
Control बजाब‘book’ kk‘dog’ बजाब k
Note. * सैमा [swima]; * बजाब [bizab]; *kk [kukur]; *k [lukur]
Procedure.
On all participants, two parts of the study were conducted in the following order: the language background survey, and the priming experiments.They were individually tested in a quiet room. Before the conduction of the experiments, they were given both verbal and written instructions about the task.
Using the DMDX software (Forster & Forster, 2003), they were presented with stimuli consisting of prime and target words in the center of a laptop screen. Each trial consisted of the following sequence: First, the participant was presented with a fixation ‘+’ for 500 ms, followed by a prime word which appeared for 400 ms. The prime word was immediately replaced by a target word (or nonword) which remained on the screen until the participants responded or for a maximum of 2,000 ms. In the masked translation priming paradigm, the sequence of a trial presentation
included the following: each trial began with a forward mask consisting of ten hash marks (##########) which appeared on the screen for 500 ms. It was immediately replaced by a prime word, appearing for a duration of 50 ms, which was followed by a target word (or nonword) and it remained on the screen until the participants responded or for a maximum of 2,000 ms. The presentation order of the word pairs was randomized for each participant. The participant initiated the trial by pressing the space bar key. Their task was to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to a target word, by pressing the following keys on the keyboard: the “Y” key with their right index finger for a real word and “N” key with their left index finger for a nonword. Before the experiment proper, each participant went through a trial with fifteen numbers of items which resembled the main task. The reaction time data and the error data were measured and saved after each experiment and further analyzed.