Learning and processing of orthography-to-phonology mappings in a third language

ABSTRACT

Bilinguals’ two languages are both active in parallel, and controlling co-activation is one of bilinguals’ principle challenges. Trilingualism multiplies this challenge. To investigate how third language (L3) learners manage interference between languages, Spanish-English bilinguals were taught an artificial language that conflicted with English and Spanish letter-sound mappings. Interference from existing languages was higher for L3 words that were similar to L1 or L2 words, but this interference decreased over time. After mastering the L3, learners continued to experience competition from their other languages. Notably, spoken L3 words activated orthography in all three languages, causing participants to experience cross-linguistic orthographic competition in the absence of phonological overlap. Results indicate that L3 learners are able to control between-language interference from the L1 and L2. We conclude that while the transition from two languages to three presents additional challenges, bilinguals are able to successfully manage competition between languages in this new context.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingualism
• bilingualism
• language learning
• eye-tracking

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the members of the Northwestern University Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group for comments on this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The novel words had larger English (M = 11.33, SE = 1.33) than Spanish (M = 4.58, SE = 0.54) neighbourhood sizes, but note that English words on average have larger neighbourhoods than Spanish words (Marian et al., 2012). The novel words’ English neighborhood size was comparable to four-letter English words’ average size of 10.33, t(23) = 0.75, n.s. Spanish neighbourhood size was slightly smaller than four-letter Spanish words’ average size of 7.87, t(23) = 6.03, p < .001.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [grant number NICHD R01 HD059858] and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke [grant number T32 NS 47987].