Improving Word Production through Comprehension Exposure

University Of Texas At El Paso, El Paso TX

Investigators

Abstract

When children learn their first language, and when adults learn a new language, they are able to understand many words before they begin to use them. In other words, comprehension precedes production. The present research investigates the cognitive processes used for language comprehension and production and whether they are sensitive to a person's prior experience with the language or with particular words. The investigators will also explore whether the way adults learn words presented on their own (as often occurs in language classes) generalizes to everyday language experience (i.e., reading prose, listening to natural speech, and producing natural speech). The research will allow the investigators to determine the cognitive processes that overlap for reading, listening to speech, and producing speech and to assess the durability of memory after these different language experiences. The research activities will increase diversity in research training and participation by including research assistants and research participants from ethnic minority groups in a region with low education and income levels. The research may also have educational implications for vocabulary development of second language learners, both in terms of study techniques for students and teaching practices for educators. This project links implicit memory, lexical access, and vocabulary development in controlled experiments with English speakers and Spanish-English bilingual speakers. Word comprehension and production processes are typically investigated separately. In contrast, the present study explores the impact of comprehension exposures on later production, using a repetition-priming procedure. The first overarching goal is to reveal the nature and durability of memory traces left by auditory and visual comprehension exposures to words as indexed by their impact on later spoken production. Second, the project aims to determine whether patterns of learning elicited by isolated words also result from words seen or heard in sentence contexts. Third, the research addresses fundamental questions about lexical processing that have been debated in the literature, for example, whether comprehension and production processes involve access to common phonological word-form representations, whether comprehension and production involve access to both modality-general and modality-specific representations, and what stages of word production are impacted by experiential variables such as word frequency and language proficiency. More generally, the research is expected to inform models of word production and implicit memory.