A Psycholinguistic Tool for the Assessment of Language Loss: The HALA Project

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dc.contributor.authorO'Grady, William
dc.contributor.authorSchafer, Amy J.
dc.contributor.authorPerla, Jawee
dc.contributor.authorLee, On-Soon
dc.contributor.authorWieting, Julia
dc.date.accessioned2009-06-30T20:50:23Z
dc.date.available2009-06-30T20:50:23Z
dc.date.issued2009-06
dc.description.abstractA major obstacle to the early diagnosis of language loss and to the assessment of language maintenance efforts is the absence of an easy-to-use psycholinguistic measure of language strength. In this paper, we describe and discuss a body-part naming task being developed as part of the Hawai‘i Assessment of Language Access (HALA) project. This task, like the others in the HALA inventory, exploits the fact that the speed with which bilingual speakers access lexical items and structure-building operations in their two languages offers a sensitive measure of relative language strength. In a pilot study conducted with Korean-English bilinguals, we were able to establish a strong correlation between language strength and naming times even in highly fluent bilingual speakers, in support of the central assumption underlying the HALA tests. We discuss the implications of this finding for the broader study of language strength as well as for the practical problems associated with work on language loss, maintenance, and revitalization.
dc.description.sponsorshipNational Foreign Language Resource Center
dc.format.extent13 pages
dc.identifier.citationO'Grady, William, Amy J. Schafer, Jawee Perla, On-Soon Lee, and Julia Wieting. 2009. A Psycholinguistic Tool for the Assessment of Language Loss: The HALA Project. Language Documentation & Conservation 3(1):100-112.
dc.identifier.issn1934-5275
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10125/4427
dc.language.isoeng
dc.publisherUniversity of Hawai'i Press
dc.rightsCreative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License
dc.subjectlanguage loss
dc.subjectattrition
dc.subjectpsycholinguistic
dc.subjectassessment
dc.titleA Psycholinguistic Tool for the Assessment of Language Loss: The HALA Project
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.dcmiText
prism.number1
prism.publicationnameLanguage Documentation & Conservation
prism.volume3

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