The LEAP-Q is a valid, reliable, and efficient tool for assessing the language profiles of multilingual, neurologically intact adult populations in research settings.

The present study examined whether bilingualism facilitates acquisition of novel words in adults with different language histories. Word-learning performance was tested in monolingual English speakers, early English-Spanish bilinguals, and early English-Mandarin bilinguals. Novel words were phonologically unfamiliar to all participants, and they were acquired in association with their English translations. At testing, both bilingual groups outperformed the monolingual group. These findings indicate that bilingualism facilitates word-learning performance in adults, and they suggest a general bilingual advantage for novel word learning.

No abstract

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but diverged from English phonologically. Native-language orthographic information presented during learning interfered with encoding of novel words in monolinguals but not in bilinguals. In general, bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on the word-learning task. These findings indicate that knowledge of 2 languages facilitates word learning and shields English-Spanish bilinguals from interference associated with cross-linguistic inconsistencies in letter-to-phoneme mappings.

Previous studies have indicated that bilingualism may facilitate lexical learning in adults. The goals of this research were (i) to examine whether bilingual influences on word learning diverge for phonologically-familiar and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, and (ii) to examine whether increased phonological memory capacity can account for bilingual effects on word learning. In Experiment 1, participants learned phonologically-familiar novel words that were constructed using the phonemes of English – the native language for all participants. In Experiment 2, participants learned phonologically-unfamiliar novel words that included non-English phonemes. In each experiment, bilingual adults were contrasted with two groups of monolingual adults: a high memory-span monolingual group (that matched bilinguals on phonological memory performance) and a low-span monolingual group. Results showed that bilingual participants in both experiments outperformed monolingual participants, both high-span and low-span. High-span monolinguals outperformed low-span monolinguals when learning phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, but not when learning phonologically-familiar novel words. The findings suggest that the bilingual advantage for novel word learning is not contingent on the phonological properties of novel words, and that phonological memory capacity as measured here cannot account for the bilingual effects on learning.