Can a Horse Be a Donkey? Semantic and Form Interference Effects in Translation Recognition in Early and Late Proficient and Nonproficient Spanish‐Catalan Bilinguals

Abstract

The present study investigates the developmental aspect of the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested SpanishCatalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient bilinguals, and 28 late nonproficient bilinguals) in a translation recognition task in which they had to decide whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. The second word of the pair could be the true translation, a word related in form, a word more or less related in meaning, or an unrelated word. The results showed that both early and late proficient bilinguals were more sensitive to the semantic than to

Vocabulary teaching strategies and conceptual representations of words in L2 in children: Evidence with novice learners

“…In this model, non-fluent L2 learners start off the acquisition process by relying on their knowledge of L1 and, as they become more proficient, they access conceptual representations directly, presumably in the same way as monolinguals. In contrast, the present findings support the view that novices encode conceptual information when learning second language words (see Altarriba & Mathis, 1997;Ferrè, Sánchez-Casas, & Guasch, 2006;Finkbeiner & Nicol, 2003, for a similar suggestion). As such, the present data are somewhat problematic for the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994;Kroll & Tokowicz, 2001.…”

“…As such, the present data are somewhat problematic for the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994;Kroll & Tokowicz, 2001. Furthermore, there is empirical evidence that shows a Stroop effect in novice learners of an L2 (e.g., Altarriba & Mathis, 1997;Ferrè et al, 2006), which again suggests that connections between L2 and the conceptual level could be established even at the very early stages of L2 acquisition. Nonetheless, as Kroll and Tokowicz (2005), see also Kroll & Linck, 2007) acknowledged, the presence of robust semantic interference effect with novice learners of L2 demonstrates ''the capabilities of the language learning situation under unique circumstanceswhen a small number of items are learned with extensive training, the results mimic those of proficient bilinguals.…”

Guessing and risk attitude in L2 vocabulary tests

“…In applied contexts, it is typically assumed that the provision of an L1 translation equivalent is the easiest way for the test takers to demonstrate their knowledge of word meaning (Nation, 2001). On the other hand, being unable to provide an appropriate L1 translation when prompted is not necessarily an indicator of the absence of semantic knowledge of an L2 word because translating is a skill on its own (see contributions in Fountain & McBeath, 1997) and translating is prone to wordfinding difficulties (Gollan & Acenas, 2004) and other task-specific interference effects (Ferre, Sanchez-Casas & Guasch, 2006). Given these problems, it seemed reasonable to accept any form of meaning provided on the control test, i.e., L1 translations, synonyms, paraphrases, or descriptions.…”

The Use of Cognate Words and Interlingual Homographs to Investigate the Cross-Linguistics in Second Language Processing in Iran

“…In spite of a number of analyses ripened to reply these queries (e.g., Basnight & Altarriba, 2007;Bassetti & Cook, 2011;Bultena, Dijkstra, & van Hell, 2014;Casaponsa, Antón, Pérez, Dunabeitia, &Mikeletegi, 2015;Ferré, Sánchez-Casas, & Guasch, 2006;Guasch, Sánchez-Casas, Ferré, & García-Albea, 2008;Kroll & Linck, 2007;Sunderman & Kroll, 2006), they are still object of controversy. One of the foremost powerful prototypes within the SLA area is the Revised Hierarchic Model (RHM) by Kroll and Stewart (1994).…”