Bilingualism reduces native-language interference during novel-word learning.
The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals but not in bilinguals. In general, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the word-learning task. These findings indicate that knowledge of 2 languages facilitates word learning and shields English-Spanish bilinguals from interference associated with cross-linguistic inconsistencies in letter-to-phoneme mappings.
Kaushanskaya
Margarita
M
Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53706, USA. kaushanskaya@wisc.edu
Marian
Viorica
V
D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D019303:Multilingualism; D010700:Phonetics; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D055815:Young Adult