# name
The Bilingual Moses Illusion: Evidence for Semantic Illusions in Spanish-Catalan Bilingual Speakers

# metadata.dc.description[].value
Treballs Finals del Màster en Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge, Facultat de Filosofia, Universitat de Barcelona, Curs: 2021-2022, Tutores: Maria Pilar Ferré Romeu i Montserrat Comesaña

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
The tendency to overlook semantic inaccuracies in questions like ‘How many animals of each
kind did Moses take on the ark?’, also known as the Moses illusion, was introduced into
research almost forty years ago. However, the cross-linguistic validation of this effect has
been limited, and studies regarding bilingual speakers are still sparse and controversial, even
though some theoretical accounts predict that processing in a second language may modulate
the rates of semantic illusions by either boosting or hindering the detection of inaccuracies.
The present investigation specifically addressed these two concerns, firstly by examining
whether the Moses illusion takes place in Spanish native speakers, and subsequently by
exploring how it is elicited in the languages of early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan
bilingual speakers. Implemented in the form of a sentential judgement task for semantically
correct and incorrect sentences adding the Self-Paced reading technique, the experiments’
results revealed that the Moses illusion happened in Spanish (Experiment 1), and with no
statistical differences across Spanish and Catalan (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that
semantic illusions take place similarly in both languages of Spanish-Catalan bilingual
speakers. Further research is required to consolidate these findings and to build a more solid
conceptual framework for the bilingual Moses illusion and second language processing.

# metadata.dc.rights[].value
cc-by-nc-nd (c) Bautista Martín, Ana María, 2022

# metadata.dc.source[].value
Màster Oficial - Ciència Cognitiva i Llenguatge (CCiL)

# metadata.dc.title[].value
The Bilingual Moses Illusion: Evidence for Semantic Illusions in Spanish-Catalan Bilingual Speakers