I know Spanish Which Romance language should I learn next L2 influence on L3 word recognition

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • David Beard
  • Emily Neff
  • Ally Bucher

• The present study addresses historical and contemporary discussions on second and third language vocabulary development, specifically the effects of lexical similarity. Second language learners of Spanish aspiring to learn another romance language completed a translation recognition task with Spanish as the source language and Portuguese or Italian as the target language. Cognate and non-cognate targets were used. Reaction times were modeled as a function of language and word type using a linear mixed-effects model with subject and item serving as random effects. Results show that there is no significant processing advantage in recognizing words in Italian or Portuguese. With respect to word type, cognates were responded to significantly faster than non-cognates. These results speak to historical and contemporary accounts of lexical similarity in that Spanish and Italian are rated at 82% and Spanish and Portuguese at 89% [13]. Implications speak to both language researchers and educators.

• Date created

  2019-03-25

• Subjects / Keywords

  • third language acquisition
  • lexical similarity measures
  • cognate facilitation effect
  • second language acquisition
  • vocabulary

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-wzxp-2s62

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International