Differences in word learning: bilingualism or linguistic experience?

Bilinguals may be better than monolinguals at word learning due to their increased experience with language learning. In addition, bilinguals that have languages that are orthotactically different could be more used to dissimilar orthotactic patterns. The current study examines how bilinguals with languages that are orthotactically similar and dissimilar and monolinguals learn novel words that violate or respect the orthotactic legality of the languages they know and how this learning may be affected by the similarity between the bilinguals’ two languages. In Experiment 1, three groups of children were tested: monolinguals, Spanish-Basque bilinguals (dissimilar orthotactic languages), and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (similar orthotactic languages). After an initial word learning phase, they were tested in a recall task and a recognition task. Results showed that Spanish-Basque bilingual children performed differently than the other two groups. While Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals recognized illegal words worse than legal words, Spanish-Basque bilinguals showed equal performance in learning illegal and legal patterns. A replication study conducted with two new groups of Spanish-Basque children (one group with high Basque proficiency and one group with a lower proficiency) indicated that the effects were not driven by the proficiency in the second language since a similar performance on legal and illegal patterns was observed in both groups. In Experiment 2, two groups of adults, monolinguals and Spanish-Basque bilinguals, were tested with the same task used in Experiment 1. The effect seen in children seems to be absent in adults. Spanish-Basque bilingual adults showed better overall learning performance than monolinguals, irrespective of the illegality of the items. Differences between groups could be due to the effect of having acquired literacy and linguistic competence.


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Bilingualism is no longer an exceptional linguistic reality and knowing more than one 44 language is required for business, education, and to communicate with others in many modern 45 societies. Thus, bilingualism has become an important research area in the last decades.

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Despite the increasing number of studies exploring the effects of bilingualism on domain-47 general and domain-specific cognitive processes [1][2][3], the impact of bilingualism on language 48 learning has received less attention. Previous work has suggested that bilinguals may be better 49 at word learning than monolinguals due to their experience with language learning (see [4]).

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However, it is not clear whether bilinguals in general are better at word learning or whether 51 these effects are related to and dependent on the specific characteristics of the two languages 52 they have mastered.

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Bilinguals know that objects may have different names in each of their languages and 54 may therefore link translations in another new language more easily to a known concept than 55 monolinguals. Along this line, studies focusing on the bilinguals' and monolinguals' capacity to 56 learn a third language have suggested that bilinguals achieve a higher proficiency level in the 57 new language than their monolingual peers [5,6]. This learning benefit has been observed both 58 for bilinguals who learned their languages in a classroom environment [7,8], as well as for 59 bilinguals who had acquired both languages from birth [4,9]. For instance, the latter two 60 studies were based on a word-learning task that included novel words created to be 61 phonologically unfamiliar to the participants. Bilingual learners had highly contrasting language 62 combinations, such as Spanish-English or Mandarin-English. The new words had to be learned 63 as translation equivalents of existing words from the participants' native language. Results 64 showed that bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in their learning performance (see [10], for 67 their memory span. Bilinguals outperformed both groups of monolinguals when learning novel 68 words irrespective of the specific phonological features of the novel words and the memory 69 span of the participants.

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However, these findings do not necessarily imply that all types of bilinguals will learn 71 novel words better than monolinguals.  underscore the 72 importance of the specific language pairs in the bilingual language system and their 73 interaction. As seen, the abovementioned studies tested bilinguals who mastered two 74 languages with clearly different orthotactic and phonotactic structures (e.g.,  or Spanish-English), and it could be tentatively hypothesized that this is the underlying factor 76 that makes the learning of new items more effective for bilinguals. Different bilingual 77 populations speak different languages and the characteristics of the specific languages spoken 78 may affect how known pieces of information are processed and, more importantly for the 79 purposes of the current study, how new pieces of information are learned. Studies suggest 80 that the structure of one's known language(s) may determine the way new sounds are 81 processed [13]. Furthermore, Bialystok et al. [2] demonstrated that bilinguals whose two 82 languages share the same print-to-sound principle and/or the same writing system (i.e., 83 Spanish-English) show better performance in a meta-phonological task (count the number of 84 sounds in a word) than bilinguals with two languages following a different writing system (i.e.,

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Chinese-English). Certainly, learning new phonological and orthographic patterns that also 86 exist in one's native language(s) is expected to be easier that learning completely different 87 patterns (see [14]). Thus, the current study examines how bilinguals and monolinguals learn 88 words that violate or respect the orthotactic legality of the languages they know (i.e., the 89 language-selective pattern of grapheme combinations in written words), and how this learning 90 may be affected by the similarity between the bilinguals' two languages. To this end, the 91 performance of two groups of bilinguals was compared to that of a group of monolinguals. presented with a screen requiring them to type on the keyboard the name of the object they 216 had just learned, and they could only continue to the next trial if the string had been written 217 correctly. Each 30 object-string association was presented three times during the learning 218 phase, leading to 90 trials that were presented in a random order.

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The testing phase included two tasks: a recall task and a recognition task. Participants 220 first completed a recall task in which they saw each 3D object and had to write down the 221 corresponding name that they had learned before. They were instructed to type the string that 222 they thought corresponded to each object, even if they did not remember the whole string.

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After entering their responses to the objects presented in a random order, they were asked to 224 complete a recognition task. In each of the trials of the recognition task, participants were 225 presented with a fixation cross displayed for 500ms, immediately followed by the centered 226 presentation of the 3D object accompanied by two response options (a correct and an 228 to strings that were presented during the learning phase, but were shuffled so that they did 229 not match the correct objects.

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In the recall task, participants recalled more legal orthotactic sequences than illegal 255 orthotactic sequences (see Table 2  affects the way they learn new words that violate or respect the orthotactic patterns of the 301 languages they know. We therefore compared monolingual children's performance to that of 302 two groups of bilinguals: one group of (Spanish-Catalan) bilinguals who speak two languages 303 with similar orthotactic patterns and one group (Spanish-Basque) speaking two languages that 304 have different orthotactic patterns. Results in the recall task showed that legal words were 305 remembered better than illegal words, but no differences between the three language groups 306 were found in this regard. However, the recognition task showed an interaction between 307 language group and illegality on accuracy, suggesting that monolinguals, Spanish-Catalan 308 bilinguals, and Spanish-Basque bilinguals differ in the way they learnt new legal and illegal 309 sequences. While monolinguals and Spanish-Catalan bilinguals recognized illegal sequences 310 worse than the legal ones, Basque-Spanish bilinguals did not show this effect. This result 311 suggests that group differences in word learning are not due to bilingualism as such but rather 312 related to the two specific languages that they know. Spanish and Basque are more dissimilar 313 (e.g., in grammar, letter sequences, phonology) than Spanish and Catalan. Therefore, the 314 absence of a legality effect in the Spanish-Basque bilinguals could be due to their linguistic 315 experience with the two distinct languages and the process of literacy acquisition (having 316 already acquired the two languages).

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In the next experiment (Experiment 1b), we firstly wanted to replicate the null result of 318 illegality in Spanish-Basque bilinguals. Furthermore, as can be seen in Table 1

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Participants were matched on their language proficiency in Spanish and English, their 338 socioeconomic status, and their IQ, as in Experiment 1a (see Table 3). However, the two 339 Basque groups differed in their subjective measure of competence in Basque and their picture-340 naming performance in Basque (see Table 3). 341 342  Basque bilinguals (a group of more balanced bilinguals and a group with the same proficiency 386 as in Experiment 1). Similar to Experiment 1a, these bilingual children recalled more legal than 387 illegal words, and importantly, they recognized legal and illegal words to the same extent.

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Furthermore, no differences were observed between these two groups regardless of their 389 proficiency differences, suggesting that the (absence of an) illegality effect was not modulated Next, we wanted to test whether the same differential pattern observed in Spanish-

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Basque bilingual children is also present in Spanish-Basque bilingual adults, or whether there is 398 a different developmental trajectory of these effects that make the absence of sensitivity to 399 orthographic markedness during new word learning (e.g. flexibility in word learning) diminish 400 as a function of age. We therefore conducted a study using the same methodology as in English, socioeconomic status, and IQ (see Table 5).