Changes in the Sensitivity to Language-Specific Orthographic Patterns With Age

Abstract

How do bilingual readers of languages that have similar scripts identify a language switch? Recent behavioral and electroencephalographic results suggest that they rely on orthotactic cues to recognize the language of the words they read in ambiguous contexts. Previous research has shown that marked words with language-specific letter sequences (i.e., letter sequences that are illegal in one of the two languages) are recognized more easily and faster than unmarked words. The aim of this study was to investigate sensitivity to markedness throughout childhood and early adulthood by using a speeded language decision task with words and pseudowords. A large group of Spanish-Basque bilinguals of different ages (children, preteenagers, teenagers and adults) was tested. Results showed a markedness effect in the second language across all age groups that changed with age. However, sensitivity to markedness in the native language was negligible. We conclude that sensitivity to orthotactics does not follow parallel developmental trend in the first and second language.

Differences in word learning in children: Bilingualism or linguistic experience?

“…The results from Experiment 2 were consistent with this finding, showing that both Basque groups with different proficiency levels reacted to the same extent to legal and illegal novel words. Although, previous research has shown that marked words are typically recognized faster than unmarked ones (Casaponsa et al, 2014) and that markedness effects are modulated by age (Duñabeitia, Borragán, de Bruin, & Casaponsa, 2020), it should be noted that those data mainly come from experiments using language detection tasks in which marked strings elicit lower cross-language activation (Casaponsa & Duñabeitia, 2016;Casaponsa et al, 2020).…”

Eye Movement Measures of Within-Language and Cross-Language Activation During Reading in Monolingual and Bilingual Children and Adults: A Focus on Neighborhood Density Effects

“…Although no prior response-based studies have investigated orthographic neighborhood effects in bilingual children, there is evidence that their visual word recognition is differentially mediated by cross-language orthographic overlap, especially when they are younger in age (for a review, see van Hell, 2020 ). For instance, Duñabeitia et al (2016) tested a large sample ( N = 100) of balanced Spanish-Basque bilingual children (aged 8–15) on L1 and L2 translation recognition tasks and found that the younger children’s performance was more sensitive to the target words’ cognate status, with greater orthographic overlap facilitating word recognition (see also Schröter and Schroeder, 2016 , 2018 and Duñabeitia et al, 2020 , for similar findings involving similar and other aspects of cross-language orthographic processing in children during L1 and L2 lexical decision tasks). These effects have been attributed to younger children’s reduced print exposure and developing language control systems, which render their lexical representations more susceptible to the effects of cross-language activation.…”