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Orthographic knowledge and lexical form influence vocabulary learning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2016

JAMES BARTOLOTTI  and
VIORICA MARIAN
JAMES BARTOLOTTI*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
VIORICA MARIAN
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE James Bartolotti, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 38 , Issue 2 , March 2017 , pp. 427 - 456
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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