Doctoral Dissertation Research: A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Second Language Lexical Acquisition

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ABSTRACTKroll & Sunderman 0111733With National Science Foundation support, Ms. Gretchen Sunderman will collect data for her doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dr. Judith Kroll. Her research will investigate the development of second language lexical fluency. Although it is common practice to have second language learners attempt to suppress their first language in classroom contexts, recent psycholinguistic research suggests that it is impossible to do so. Words in the first language are active and compete for selection even when learners intend to read or speak in the second language only. Ms. Sunderman's experiments will include three groups of native speakers of English at different stages of second language proficiency in Spanish. Her goal is to examine the activation of the first language as learners acquire Spanish. One set of experiments will examine the first language in comprehension, and another set of experiments will examine it in spoken production. Participants will also take a battery of individual differences tests in their first language. Comparisons of these second language learners to monolinguals matched on the individual differences measures will provide an examination of some cognitive consequences of second language learning for first language performance.This research is important for several reasons. First, it will advance our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in second language lexical acquisition. Second, it will advance our understanding of cross-language competition at different levels of second language proficiency. Finally, in examining differences in individuals' ability to suppress the first language during second language comprehension and production, this research will inform second language pedagogy and enhance the success of learning and teaching of second language vocabulary.