The Stroop effect on Slovak-Hungarian bilinguists.

We studied the processes of interference vs language automatisms in a group of Slovak-Hungarian bilinguists (N = 19, age 13 years) and compared their performance in the Stroop test with two control groups - Slovak (N = 24) and Hungarian (N = 31) monolinguists of the same age. - The Stroop effect, whose essence is an interfering effect of the meaning of the word on its physical characteristic - colour, proved to be a suitable method in the study of information processing in the semantic memory of bilinguists as well as in determining dominance of one language over the other. Slovak-Hungarian bilinguists showed, as a rule, shorter times in Hungarian and approximated in their performance Hungarian monolinguists. It can be assumed that reaction times in the Stroop test are conditioned not only by interference of the other language but also by language automatisms, whereby interference and speech automatisms are in an indirect correlation. - The results thus indicate that processes of interference and language automatisms cannot be separated. Dominance of one language structure over the other (Hungarian over Slovak) was confirmed not only in our experimental method but also in the subjective rating.

Recall in acoustically similar and dissimilar letters by normal and deaf subjects.

Stimulus matrices with 4 X 3 letters from an acoustically similar and dissimilar alphabet were presented tachystoscopically for 5 secs to 41 Ss divided into three groups, i.e. normal and deaf apprentices and deaf children. Each S was administered 42 stimulus matrices. While the difference in the number of errors between the acoustically similar and dissimilar alphabets proved significant in the hearing Ss, it was nonsignificant in the deaf, and in contrast to these two groups, in the children the number of errors with the acoustically similar alphabet was lower than with the dissimilar one. The error matrices indicate a systematic course of errors and their different pattern for the hearing and the deaf Ss. A visual and an articulating code which is reinforced by the length of oral training, may be presumed particularly in the deaf.