Daidone Danielle, Darcy Isabelle
Department of World Languages and Cultures, University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC, United States.
Department of Second Language Studies, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, United States.
Front Psychol. 2021 Jul 22;12:688356. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.688356. eCollection 2021.
This study investigates the relationship between the accuracy of second language lexical representations and perception, phonological short-term memory, inhibitory control, attention control, and second language vocabulary size. English-speaking learners of Spanish were tested on their lexical encoding of the Spanish /ɾ-r/, /ɾ-d/, /r-d/, and /f-p/ contrasts through a lexical decision task. Perception ability was measured with an oddity task, phonological short-term memory with a serial non-word recognition task, attention control with a flanker task, inhibitory control with a retrieval-induced inhibition task, and vocabulary size with the X_Lex vocabulary test. Results revealed that differences in perception performance, inhibitory control, and attention control were not related to differences in lexical encoding accuracy. Phonological short-term memory was a significant factor, but only for the /r-ɾ/ contrast. This suggests that when representations contain sounds that are differentiated along a dimension not used in the native language, learners with higher phonological short-term memory have an advantage because they are better able to hold the relevant phonetic details in memory long enough to be transferred to long-term representations. Second language vocabulary size predicted lexical encoding across three of the four contrasts, such that a larger vocabulary predicted greater accuracy. This is likely because the acquisition of more phonologically similar words forces learners' phonological systems to create more detailed representations in order for such words to be differentiated. Overall, this study suggests that vocabulary size in the second language is the most important factor in the accuracy of lexical representations.
本研究调查了第二语言词汇表征的准确性与感知、语音短期记忆、抑制控制、注意力控制和第二语言词汇量之间的关系。以英语为母语的西班牙语学习者通过词汇判断任务，对他们对西班牙语/ɾ-r/、/ɾ-d/、/r-d/和/f-p/对比的词汇编码进行了测试。感知能力通过奇异性任务进行测量，语音短期记忆通过系列非词识别任务进行测量，注意力控制通过侧翼任务进行测量，抑制控制通过提取诱导抑制任务进行测量，词汇量通过X_Lex词汇测试进行测量。结果显示，感知表现、抑制控制和注意力控制方面的差异与词汇编码准确性的差异无关。语音短期记忆是一个重要因素，但仅适用于/r-ɾ/对比。这表明，当表征包含在母语中未使用的维度上有区别的声音时，具有较高语音短期记忆的学习者具有优势，因为他们能够更好地将相关语音细节在记忆中保持足够长的时间，以便转移到长期表征中。第二语言词汇量预测了四个对比中的三个对比的词汇编码，即词汇量越大，预测的准确性越高。这可能是因为习得更多语音相似的单词会迫使学习者的语音系统创建更详细的表征，以便区分这些单词。总体而言，本研究表明，第二语言的词汇量是词汇表征准确性的最重要因素。
