The Influence of Cross-Linguistic Similarity and Language Background on Writing to Dictation.

Antonio Iniesta,Eleonora Rossi,Daniela Paolieri,M Teresa Bajo

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679956

Antonio Iniesta, Eleonora Rossi + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.679956

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Abstract

This study used a word dictation task to examine the influence of a variety of factors on word writing production: cognate status (cognate vs. non-cognate words), orthographic (OS) and phonological similarity (PS) within the set of cognate words, and language learning background [late bilinguals (LBs) with academic literacy and formal instruction in English and Spanish, and heritage speakers (HSs) with academic literacy and formal instruction only in English]. Both accuracy and reaction times for the first key pressed by participants (indicating lexical access), and the time required to type the rest of the word after the first keypress (indicating sublexical processing) was assessed. The results revealed an effect of PS on the dictation task particularly for the first keypress. That is, cognates with high PS were processed faster than cognates with low PS. In contrast to reading studies in which PS only revealed a significant effect when the OS between languages was high (O+P+ vs. O+P−), in the dictation to writing task, the phonology had a more general effect across all conditions, regardless of the level of OS. On the other hand, OS tended to be more influential for typing the rest of the word. This pattern is interpreted as indicating the importance of phonology (and PS in cognates) for initial lexical retrieval when the input is aural. In addition, the role of OS and PS during co-activation was different between groups probably due to the participants’ linguistic learning environment. Concretely, HSs were found to show relatively lower OS effects, which is attributed to the greater emphasis on spoken language in their Spanish language learning experiences, compared to the formal education received by the LBs. Thus, the study demonstrates that PS can influence lexical processing of cognates, as long as the task demands specifically require phonological processing, and that variations in language learning experiences also modulate lexical processing in bilinguals.

Highlights

A central question in bilingual research has been to determine how bilinguals manage the use of words from different languages (Kroll et al, 2013; Costa and Sebastián-Gallés, 2014)
The results indicated that for the first key, the effect of the phonological similarity (PS) was present in the two languages and for the two groups, PS effects were stronger for the HSs than LBs
orthographic similarity (OS) had an effect in the Spanish block but this effect interacted with PS

Summary

Introduction

A central question in bilingual research has been to determine how bilinguals manage the use of words from different languages (Kroll et al, 2013; Costa and Sebastián-Gallés, 2014). Behavioral studies using different experimental tasks (lexical decision, word recognition, naming, and translation) have demonstrated that cognate words are processed faster than non-cognates (words with different lexical representations between languages, i.e., “bed” in English and “cama” in Spanish). This evidence comes from studies in which the words were presented in the visual (e.g., Dijkstra et al, 1999; Costa et al, 2000; Hoshino and Kroll, 2008; Peeters et al, 2013) and the auditory modalities (Andras et al, under review; Woutersen et al, 1995; Bowers et al, 2000). Most models of bilingual language processing assume that both languages are co-activated and include predictions for the role of cognate words during word recognition (e.g., bilingual interactive activation BIA+ model; Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) and word production (e.g., The revised hierarchical model – RHM; Kroll et al, 2010)

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