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Dutch-Australian emigrant homepages
Subjects were 88 Dutch emigrants in Melbourne, who were tested on their global knowledge of Dutch using standard Cloze, Editing and Fluency tests. The reasons for non-use were investigated in a questionnaire and a structured interview.
In order to assess specific changes in language processing in the "dormant" Dutch mother tongue, two experiments were conducted, in addition to interviews and story-retell tasks in which subjects had to communicate in Dutch.
A lexical decision experiment investigated whether the recognition of written function and content words in Dutch had deteriorated, and if so, which lexical variables affected performance.
A picture-naming experiment investigated the readiness of subjects to name computer images of common objects in Dutch, and in case the Dutch word could not be recalled, whether it could subsequently be identified. Picture-names ranged from cognate to different to English, and single to compound-stem.
The analyses concentrate on interaction between type of subject (based on their background information in the questionaire), the level of residual proficiency in Dutch, and the lexical characteristics of the target words.
In addition, story-retell and interview sessions provided a large data-base for future studies on 'Strutch', the mixture of English and Dutch used by some emigrants in Australia
For comments and job offers, mail to: ton.ammerlaan@ft.han.nl
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