An Experimental Study of the Relationship between Representational Systems in the Bilingual and Psychological Differentiation.

Abstract

A sample of 98 bilingual students, equally proficient in English and Yoruba, were ordered from low to high separation of representational systems on the basis of their scores on three verbal indices: (1) percentage of responses given to a word association test in English which could not be translated into Yoruba. (2) Percentage of correctly identified sentences in a sentence recognition test and (3) differences in performance on a bigram test when the instructions were given in English or Yoruba or English and Yoruba. Respondents then participated in a task involving a shortened form of Witkin's Embedded Figures Test. It was predicted that the degree of separation of representational systems is significantly related to field dependence/independence. The results of this preliminary study are interpreted to indicate that the degree of separation of the bilingual's representational systems may be related to his/her degree of psychological differentiation.




(IFE Psychologia (2002) 10(2), 127-135)