Doctoral Dissertation Research: Cross-language Interactions in Beginning Adult Bilinguals

San Diego State University Foundation, San Diego CA

Investigators

Abstract

The United States lags far behind other countries in terms of foreign language success rates, which has far-reaching implications for our engagement, safety, and growth in an increasingly global world. One reason for this lag might be that American students are first introduced to a second language relatively late, often not until high school or college. Learning a second language at these ages can be quite challenging, in part because of the extensive linguistic knowledge that young adults already have in their native language. The goal of the present research is to better understand how different types of native language knowledge influence second language word learning: How does the native language help or hinder second language word learning in young adults and why? Understanding these interactions will further our understanding of how the new second language words are represented in the brain and how they are connected up to the existing linguistic system. The extent to which involvement of the native language differs as a function of learning methodology will also be tested. These studies will help form the foundation for the development of more effective, evidence-based foreign language teaching practices. More specifically, the proposed studies use event-related potentials (ERPs) to track second language word learning among monolingual college students in a laboratory setting. ERPs measure the electrical activity of the brain on a millisecond-by-millisecond basis, which makes them useful for tracking how rapid word recognition processes unfold over time. The focus is on two specific types of native language words and how their relative importance changes over learning time. Aim 1 considers how newly learned second language words (e.g., lait is the French word for 'milk') interact with the mental representations of neighboring native language words (e.g., laid, last), which overlap in form. Aim 2 considers the connections between the second language word representations (e.g., lait) and their native language translation equivalents (e.g., milk), which overlap in meaning. Both types of words play prominent roles in theoretical models of second language learning and processing; however, their specific roles differ substantially across models. Thus, the field is in need of empirical evidence that will adjudicate between these various models and advance our understanding of how newly learned words are integrated with the native language lexicon. Understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of second language word learning is a prerequisite to developing evidence-based teaching practices and improving foreign language outcomes among young adult students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.