Abstract
Ambiguous words are hard to learn, yet little is known about what causes this difficulty. The current study aimed to investigate the relationship between the representations of new and prior meanings of ambiguous words in second language (L2) learning, and to explore the function of inhibitory control on L2 ambiguous word learning at the initial stage of learning. During a 4-day learning phase, Chinese–English bilinguals learned 30 novel English words for 30 min per day using bilingual flashcards. Half of the words to be learned were unambiguous (had one meaning) and half were ambiguous (had two semantically unrelated meanings learned in sequence). Inhibitory control was introduced as a subject variable measured by a Stroop task. The semantic representations established for the studied items were probed using a cross-language semantic relatedness judgment task, in which the learned English words served as the prime, and the targets were either semantically related or unrelated to the prime. Results showed that response latencies for the second meaning of ambiguous words were slower than for the first meaning and for unambiguous words, and that performance on only the second meaning of ambiguous words was predicted by inhibitory control ability. These results suggest that, at the initial stage of L2 ambiguous word learning, the representation of the second meaning is weak, probably interfered with by the representation of the prior learned meaning. Moreover, inhibitory control may modulate learning of the new meanings, such that individuals with better inhibitory control may more effectively suppress interference from the first meaning, and thus learn the new meaning more quickly.
Highlights
Vocabulary proficiency is an important aspect of second language (L2) ability, and vocabulary learning is crucial to developing L2 proficiency
Given that the one of the major interests of this study was to investigate whether individual differences in inhibitory control ability may contribute to ambiguous word learning, potential factors which may confound with the influence of inhibition control on learning outcomes should be controlled, e.g., the confounding effects of word proficiency
In order to ensure the proficiency of unambiguous words did not differ from that of ambiguous words, and that the first and the second meanings were comparable in proficiency, an English-to-Chinese translation production test was administered at the end of each learning day
Summary
Vocabulary proficiency is an important aspect of second language (L2) ability, and vocabulary learning is crucial to developing L2 proficiency. For learners of a second language, as their proficiency improves, they are constantly encountering and learning new words or new meanings of already known words. We focus on meaning relations of L2 ambiguous words during learning. In English, most words have multiple meanings. A major barrier to L2 vocabulary learning is the mismatches between L1 and L2 at the lexical level (MacWhinney, 1997; Tokowicz et al, 2002; Prior et al, 2007; Tokowicz, 2014). The English word “sentence” refers to both “a group of words which, when they are written down, begin with a capital letter and end with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark” and “the punishment that a person receives after they have been found guilty of a crime.” Unsurprisingly, for a Chinese learner of English, he will find no corresponding word in Chinese that express the exact two meanings of “sentence,” instead, two words, “ (juzi)” (the grammatical meaning) and “ (xuan pan)”(the legal meaning) to represent the two meanings of sentence, separately
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