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Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning

The effects of cognate synonymy in L2 word learning are explored. Participants learned the names of well-known concrete concepts in a new fictional language following a picture-word association paradigm. Half of the concepts (set A) had two possible translations in the new language (i.e., both words...

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Autores principales: Antón, Eneko, Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7463594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32751282
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10080123
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author Antón, Eneko
Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
author_facet Antón, Eneko
Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
author_sort Antón, Eneko
collection PubMed
description The effects of cognate synonymy in L2 word learning are explored. Participants learned the names of well-known concrete concepts in a new fictional language following a picture-word association paradigm. Half of the concepts (set A) had two possible translations in the new language (i.e., both words were synonyms): one was a cognate in participants’ L1 and the other one was not. The other half of the concepts (set B) had only one possible translation in the new language, a non-cognate word. After learning the new words, participants’ memory was tested in a picture-word matching task and a translation recognition task. In line with previous findings, our results clearly indicate that cognates are much easier to learn, as we found that the cognate translation was remembered much better than both its non-cognate synonym and the non-cognate from set B. Our results also seem to suggest that non-cognates without cognate synonyms (set B) are better learned than non-cognates with cognate synonyms (set A). This suggests that, at early stages of L2 acquisition, learning a cognate would produce a poorer acquisition of its non-cognate synonym, as compared to a solely learned non-cognate. These results are discussed in the light of different theories and models of bilingual mental lexicon.
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spelling pubmed-74635942020-09-02 Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning Antón, Eneko Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni Behav Sci (Basel) Article The effects of cognate synonymy in L2 word learning are explored. Participants learned the names of well-known concrete concepts in a new fictional language following a picture-word association paradigm. Half of the concepts (set A) had two possible translations in the new language (i.e., both words were synonyms): one was a cognate in participants’ L1 and the other one was not. The other half of the concepts (set B) had only one possible translation in the new language, a non-cognate word. After learning the new words, participants’ memory was tested in a picture-word matching task and a translation recognition task. In line with previous findings, our results clearly indicate that cognates are much easier to learn, as we found that the cognate translation was remembered much better than both its non-cognate synonym and the non-cognate from set B. Our results also seem to suggest that non-cognates without cognate synonyms (set B) are better learned than non-cognates with cognate synonyms (set A). This suggests that, at early stages of L2 acquisition, learning a cognate would produce a poorer acquisition of its non-cognate synonym, as compared to a solely learned non-cognate. These results are discussed in the light of different theories and models of bilingual mental lexicon. MDPI 2020-07-29 /pmc/articles/PMC7463594/ /pubmed/32751282 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10080123 Text en © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Antón, Eneko
Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title_full Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title_fullStr Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title_full_unstemmed Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title_short Better to Be Alone than in Bad Company: Cognate Synonyms Impair Word Learning
title_sort better to be alone than in bad company: cognate synonyms impair word learning
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7463594/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32751282
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs10080123
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