TY - JOUR
T1 - Orthographic knowledge and lexical form influence vocabulary learning
AU - Bartolotti, James
AU - Marian, Viorica
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported in part by NICHD Grants R01 HD059858, NIH R01 DC008333, and T32 NS 47987-8. The authors thank Sana Ali for help testing participants and the members of the Northwestern University Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group for comments on this work.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016.
PY - 2017/3/1
Y1 - 2017/3/1
N2 - Many adults struggle with second language acquisition but learn new native-language words relatively easily. We investigated the role of sublexical native-language patterns on novel word acquisition. Twenty English monolinguals learned 48 novel written words in five repeated testing blocks. Half were orthographically wordlike (e.g., nish, high neighborhood density and high segment/bigram frequency), while half were not (e.g., gofp, low neighborhood density and low segment/bigram frequency). Participants were faster and more accurate at recognizing and producing wordlike items, indicating a native-language similarity benefit. Individual differences in memory and vocabulary size influenced learning, and error analyses indicated that participants extracted probabilistic information from the novel vocabulary. Results suggest that language learners benefit from both native-language overlap and regularities within the novel language.
AB - Many adults struggle with second language acquisition but learn new native-language words relatively easily. We investigated the role of sublexical native-language patterns on novel word acquisition. Twenty English monolinguals learned 48 novel written words in five repeated testing blocks. Half were orthographically wordlike (e.g., nish, high neighborhood density and high segment/bigram frequency), while half were not (e.g., gofp, low neighborhood density and low segment/bigram frequency). Participants were faster and more accurate at recognizing and producing wordlike items, indicating a native-language similarity benefit. Individual differences in memory and vocabulary size influenced learning, and error analyses indicated that participants extracted probabilistic information from the novel vocabulary. Results suggest that language learners benefit from both native-language overlap and regularities within the novel language.
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U2 - 10.1017/S0142716416000242
DO - 10.1017/S0142716416000242
M3 - Article
C2 - 28781397
AN - SCOPUS:84979984745
VL - 38
SP - 427
EP - 456
JO - Applied Psycholinguistics
JF - Applied Psycholinguistics
SN - 0142-7164
IS - 2
ER -