Lexical and semantic representations in the acquisition of L2 cognate and non-cognate words: Evidence from two learning methods in children

How bilinguals represent words in two languages and which mechanisms are responsible for second language acquisition are important questions in the bilingual and vocabulary acquisition literature. This study aims to analyse the effect of two learning methods (picture‐ vs. word‐based method) and two...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The British journal of psychology 2012-08, Vol.103 (3), p.378-392
Main Authors: Comesaña, Montserrat, Soares, Ana Paula, Sánchez-Casas, Rosa, Lima, Cátia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Bilingualism
Biological and medical sciences
Child
Child development
Children
Cognition
Developmental psychology
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Humans
Information processing
Language acquisition
Language Tests
Learning
Magnitude
Mental Recall
Multilingualism
Portugal
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reaction Time
Semantics
Teaching methods
Translation
Translations
Vocabulary
Words
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Summary:How bilinguals represent words in two languages and which mechanisms are responsible for second language acquisition are important questions in the bilingual and vocabulary acquisition literature. This study aims to analyse the effect of two learning methods (picture‐ vs. word‐based method) and two types of words (cognates and non‐cognates) in early stages of children's L2 acquisition. Forty‐eight native speakers of European Portuguese, all sixth graders (mean age = 10.87 years; SD= 0.85), participated in the study. None of them had prior knowledge of Basque (the L2 in this study). After a learning phase in which L2 words were learned either by a picture‐ or a word‐based method, children were tested in a backward‐word translation recognition task at two times (immediately vs. one week later). Results showed that the participants made more errors when rejecting semantically related than semantically unrelated words as correct translations (semantic interference effect). The magnitude of this effect was higher in the delayed test condition regardless of the learning method. Moreover, the overall performance of participants from the word‐based method was better than the performance of participants from the picture‐word method. Results were discussed concerning the most significant bilingual lexical processing models.
ISSN:0007-1269
2044-8295
DOI:10.1111/j.2044-8295.2011.02080.x