{"pk":26522,"title":"Cross-Linguistic Similarities Aid Third Language Learning in Bilinguals","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Learning a new language involves significant vocabulary ac-quisition. Learners can accelerate this process by relying onwords with native-language overlap, such as cognates. Forbilingual third language learners, it is necessary to determinehow their two existing languages interact during novel lan-guage learning. A scaffolding account predicts transfer fromeither language for individual words, whereas an accumula-tion account predicts cumulative transfer from both languages.To compare these accounts, twenty English-German bilingualadults were taught an artificial language containing 48 novelwritten words that varied orthogonally in English and Germanwordlikeness (neighborhood size and orthotactic probability).Wordlikeness in each language improved word production ac-curacy, and similarity to one language provided the same bene-fit as dual-language overlap. In addition, participants’ memoryfor novel words was affected by the statistical distributions ofletters in the novel language. Results indicate that bilingualsutilize both languages during third language acquisition, sup-porting a scaffolding learning model.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Bilingualism; Language learning"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1w97n5zw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"James","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bartolotti","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""},{"first_name":"Viorica","middle_name":"","last_name":"Marian","name_suffix":"","institution":"Northwestern University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26522/galley/16158/download/"}]}