What are the effects of experience on subsequent learning? We explored the effects of language-specific word order knowledge on the acquisition of sequential conditional information. Korean and English adults were engaged in a sequence learning task involving three different sets of stimuli: auditory linguistic (nonsense syllables), visual…

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word…

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this "arbitrariness" assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking…

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? "Journal of Memory Language" 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian-Galles (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America" 110, 1608-1618.] found that…

Perception of American Sign Language (ASL) handshape and place of articulation parameters was investigated in three groups of signers: deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers who acquired ASL between the ages of 10 and 18, and hearing non-native signers who acquired ASL as a second language between the ages of 10 and 26. Participants were…

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. "Journal of Memory and Language," 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults…

Compared online processing of Catalan phonemic contrasts in Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant Catalan-Spanish bilingual undergraduate students. Results supported hypothesis that L1 (first language) shapes the perceptual system at early stages of development in such a way that it will determine the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts,…

Examined the relationship between first- and second-language literacy by identifying the skills and processes developed in the first language that were transferred to the second language. Subjects were 40 students from China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Australia. Found that people learning English as a second language transfer their literacy…

Do different L1 (first language) writing systems differentially affect word identification in English as a second language (ESL)? Wang, Koda, and Perfetti [Cognition 87 (2003) 129] answered yes by examining Chinese students with a logographic L1 background and Korean students with an alphabetic L1 background for their phonological and orthographic…