Verbal Working Memory Is Related to the Acquisition of Cross-Linguistic Phonological Regularities.

Evelyn Bosma,Wilbert Heeringa,Elma Blom,Eric Hoekstra,Arjen Versloot

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01487

Abstract

Closely related languages share cross-linguistic phonological regularities, such as Frisian -âld [ͻ:t] and Dutch -oud [ʱut], as in the cognate pairs kâld [kͻ:t] – koud [kʱut] ‘cold’ and wâld [wͻ:t] – woud [wʱut] ‘forest’. Within Bybee’s (1995, 2001, 2008, 2010) network model, these regularities are, just like grammatical rules within a language, generalizations that emerge from schemas of phonologically and semantically related words. Previous research has shown that verbal working memory is related to the acquisition of grammar, but not vocabulary. This suggests that verbal working memory supports the acquisition of linguistic regularities. In order to test this hypothesis we investigated whether verbal working memory is also related to the acquisition of cross-linguistic phonological regularities. For three consecutive years, 5- to 8-year-old Frisian-Dutch bilingual children (n = 120) were tested annually on verbal working memory and a Frisian receptive vocabulary task that comprised four cognate categories: (1) identical cognates, (2) non-identical cognates that either do or (3) do not exhibit a phonological regularity between Frisian and Dutch, and (4) non-cognates. The results showed that verbal working memory had a significantly stronger effect on cognate category (2) than on the other three cognate categories. This suggests that verbal working memory is related to the acquisition of cross-linguistic phonological regularities. More generally, it confirms the hypothesis that verbal working memory plays a role in the acquisition of linguistic regularities.

Highlights

Related languages such as Frisian and Dutch share cross-linguistic phonological regularities (Sjölin, 1976; Rys, 2009; Taeldeman, 2013)
We investigated this hypothesis by examining whether verbal working memory is related to the acquisition of crosslinguistic phonological regularities, such as Frisian -âld [O:t] and Dutch -oud [Aut], as in the cognate pairs kâld [kO:t] – koud [kAut] ‘cold’ and wâld [wO:t] – woud [wAut] ‘forest’
In line with previous studies, the results showed significant main effects of age, socioeconomic status (SES), non-verbal IQ and exposure on Frisian receptive vocabulary, with higher scores on these variables resulting in better vocabulary scores

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Related languages such as Frisian and Dutch share cross-linguistic phonological regularities (Sjölin, 1976; Rys, 2009; Taeldeman, 2013). Previous studies did not find a relationship between verbal working memory and the acquisition of vocabulary (Engel de Abreu and Gathercole, 2012; Verhagen and Leseman, 2016), we expected to find this relationship when the words follow a particular pattern To this end, we investigated children’s vocabulary acquisition in a bilingual context with two closely related languages that share cross-linguistic phonological regularities. In order to answer this question, we used the longitudinal data from the 5- to 8-year-old children in our previous cognate study (Bosma et al, 2016) and investigated associations with verbal working memory, thereby controlling for verbal short-term memory (Engel de Abreu and Gathercole, 2012), SES (Rice and Hoffman, 2015), exposure (Pearson et al, 1997), non-verbal IQ (Rice and Hoffman, 2015) and age, which have previously been shown to be related to vocabulary learning

Participants

Procedure

RESULTS

DISCUSSION

ETHICS STATEMENT