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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Hum. Neurosci.
Sec. Speech and Language
Volume 18 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2024.1418797
This article is part of the Research Topic Role of Perceptual and Motor Representations in Bilingual and Second Language Processing View all 4 articles

Dedicated comparatives aid comparisons of magnitude: A study with Pitjantjatjara-English bilinguals

Provisionally accepted
Luke Greenacre Luke Greenacre 1Rebecca Defina Rebecca Defina 2*Skye Akbar Skye Akbar 3Jair E. Garcia Jair E. Garcia 4
  • 1 Monash Business School, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  • 2 The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia
  • 3 UniSA Business school, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
  • 4 Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    When expressing comparisons of magnitude, Pitjantjatjara, a language indigenous to the land now known as Australia, employs contextually driven comparators (e.g. Anyupa is tall. Uma is short) rather than a dedicated morphological or syntactic comparative construction (e.g. Anyupa is taller than Uma). Pitjantjatjara also has a small number of lexicalized numerals, employing ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, then ‘many’. It is hypothesized that having dedicated comparatives in language and elaborated number systems aid comparisons of magnitudes. Fluent Pitjantjatjara-English bilinguals participated in tasks assessing their accuracy and reaction times when comparing two types of magnitude: numerosity (quantities of dots), and extent (line lengths). They repeated the comparisons in both languages on different days, allowing for the effect of language being spoken on responses to be assessed. No differences were found for numerosity; however, participants were less accurate when making comparisons of extent using Pitjantjatjara. Accuracy when using Pitjantjatjara decreased as the magnitude of the comparison increased and as differences between the comparators decreased. This result suggests a potential influence of linguistic comparison strategy on comparison behavior.

    Keywords: Language 1, Comparisons 2, Magnitude 3, number, Quantity 5, Extent 6

    Received: 17 Apr 2024; Accepted: 29 Aug 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Greenacre, Defina, Akbar and Garcia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Rebecca Defina, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia

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