Cross-linguistic priming and consolidation effects in early vocabulary learning

Description

It has often been the presumption that reverse cross-linguistic influence requires an advanced fluency in the second language. This assumption has led to much of the research focusing on the impact of the speaker’s existing languages towards their second or third language. Our mental lexicons are, however, in a constant state of change through learning, forgetting, and consolidation, and we should hence consider the study of language loss as an integral part of language acquisition (Sharwood Smith, 1989). If we want to fully understand the process of language loss, we should start from the early stages of language acquisition. In the present experiment the participants are taught an artificial language in which a portion of the words do not conveniently map onto the participants’ native language (English). The purpose of the study is to find whether limited, but observable, automatized effects can be observed in the learner’s mother tongue at the very early stage of language acquisition.

Period	2019 May 28
Held at	University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International