Bilingualism reduces native-language interference during novel-word learning.

Full Abstract

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals but not in bilinguals. In general, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the word-learning task. These findings indicate that knowledge of 2 languages facilitates word learning and shields English-Spanish bilinguals from interference associated with cross-linguistic inconsistencies in letter-to-phoneme mappings. Copyright 2009 APA, all rights reserved.

Author information

Author/s: Kaushanskaya, Margarita (M); Marian, Viorica (V);

Affiliation: Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53706, USA. kaushanskaya(-atsign-)wisc.edu

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

Journal: Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition (J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-May; vol 35 (issue 3) : pp 829-35

Dates: Created 2009/04/21; Completed 2009/06/26;

PMID: 19379054, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 6/26/2009, IMS Date: 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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