Orthographic similarity of words and learner’s meta-awareness in acquiring foreign vocabulary

Principal investigator: dr hab. Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic

When learning a foreign language, we get to realize that there are certain words which are orthographically very similar or identical to words in our native language, and that their meaning is also similar to our native words. These words are called cognates. However, there are also words whose orthographic similarity is deceptive because their meaning is different from what we expect based on their spelling. These words are called false friends or interlingual homographs. Since orthography makes cognates and false friends quite “special” across languages, these words have been in focus of both psycholinguistic experimental research and second language acquisition (SLA) research. Quite surprisingly, however, these two lines of study differ so much in the way they tackle cross-linguistically similar words, that they do not provide a unified account of the mechanism underlying the acquisition of cognates and false friends in the second language. This project aimed to fill this gap.

We planned a series of tasks designed both for the language classroom and for the laboratory.

We tried to answer whether methods of learning vocabulary used in psycholinguistic experiments and methods of learning used in real life (such as intentional learning from vocabulary exercises and incidental learning from reading texts) would yield comparable results in measuring how cognates, false friends and other words are learned.

Further, we asked whether the results obtained in the classroom could be predicted by the same factors as the results obtained in psycholinguistic experiments. We wanted to find out whether they depend on similar cognitive mechanisms.

Finally, in our project tried to answer whether the learner’s awareness of cross-linguistic similarity is necessary to increase his/her benefit when learning cross-linguistically similar words.

 

Duration of the project: 2017- 2020

NCN OPUS grant awarded to Agnieszka Otwinowska-Kasztelanic (National Science Centre, Poland, 2016/21/B/HS6/01129),  495 600 PLN

Project funded by