Listening to a Voice Canoe: Differences in Meaning Association between Māori Bilingual and Pākehā Monolingual Speakers

This study is part of ongoing research on bilingualism in Māori and English and on how knowledge of te reo Māori contributes to variation and expansion of New Zealand English. To approach this topic, a research project was carried out that consists of two diverse tasks: a story-telling task based on a picture prompt and a meaning interpretation task of a set of novel English noun-noun compounds. The compound meaning interpretation task, which is explored in this article, aims at investigating whether monolingual and bilingual participants show a difference when interpreting the meaning of the novel compounds. Potential differences in meaning associations could involve the application of figurative interpretations in line with the hypothesis that bilingual speakers might show more cognitive flexibility (cf. Bialystok 2009) and an increased propensity for divergent thinking when associating to given concepts. In Kharkhurin’s work (2012), divergent thinking is considered as one aspect of creativity, and bilingual speakers have shown advantages over monolinguals in tasks assessing divergent thinking. The compound interpretation task that is discussed in this paper offers further insights into the relation of bilingualism and divergent thinking as well as into the occurrence of figurative associations.