This Monday Noèlia Sanahuja (University of the Basque Country) will present her results from the experiment conducted during her stay at the UB. This will be the last seminar of the year!
The facilitatory role of lexical co-activation in second language rule learning
According to Hopp’s (2014) Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, difficulties in second language (L2) lexical processing lead to non-target syntactic computations. In line with this hypothesis, cognates —which are processed faster than non-cognates, as defined by the cognate facilitation effect— ease L2 syntactic processing (Miller 2014; Hopp 2017). The current study investigated whether cognates additionally facilitate L2 syntax learning. Our hypothesis claimed that the use of a cognate vocabulary would ease L2 rule learning. Sixty Spanish natives with no previous knowledge of Basque learnt an artificial language drawing on that language. Participants were split into two groups. In a first vocabulary learning phase, each group learnt five Basque non-cognate nouns and either four Spanish-Basque cognate or non-cognate verbs with the help of a picture-word matching task and a picture-naming task. Then, each group was exposed to picture-sentence pairs, with sentences containing either a cognate or a non-cognate verb. All sentences followed a case-marking rule (subject –ak, object –a) yielding SOV and OSV sentences (1). In a second vocabulary learning phase, each group learnt four new non-cognate verbs. Then, rule learning was tested in (i) a picture-sentence congruency task with non-cognate sentences and semantic fillers and (ii) a written production task. The picture-sentence congruency task suggested that rule learning was comparable for cognate and non-cognate learners (p = .53). Nevertheless, a possible between-group learning difference could have been masked by a semantic bias in participants’ responses. The production task indicated that cognate learners mastered the case-marking rule to a higher degree of proficiency than non-cognate learners (p = .01). This result reveals that cognates facilitated L2 rule learning. This facilitation is attributed to the fact that retrieving non-cognates from the lexicon is more costly than retrieving cognates, and this, in turn, causes non-cognate learners to have more difficulty learning a grammatical rule. These results align with the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis and further extend its postulates from L2 syntax processing to L2 syntax learning.
References:
Hopp, H. (2014). Working memory effects on the L2 processing of ambiguous relative clauses. Language Acquisition, 21, 250–278.
Hopp, H. (2017). Cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic co-activation in L2 sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 7(1), 96-130.
Miller, K. (2014). Accessing and maintaining referents in L2 processing of wh-dependencies. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4(2), 167–191.
Location: Online (Microsoft Teams). Click here to join the meeting