Cross-Situational Word Learning in Two Foreign Languages: Effects of Native Language and Perceptual Difficulty

Abstract

Cross-situational word learning (CSWL) paradigms have gained traction in recent years as a way to examine word learning in ambiguous scenarios in infancy, childhood, and adulthood. However, no study thus far has examined how CSWL paradigms may provide viable learning pathways for second language (L2) word learning. Here, we used a CSWL paradigm to examine how native Australian English (AusE) speakers learned novel Dutch (Experiment 1) and Brazilian Portuguese (Experiment 2) word-object pairings. During each learning phase trial, two words and objects were presented without indication as to which auditory word belonged to which visual referent. The two auditory words formed a non-minimal or vowel minimal pair. Minimal pairs were classified as “perceptually easy” or “perceptually difficult” based on the acoustic-phonetic relationship between AusE and each L2. At test, participants again saw two visual referents but heard one auditory label and were asked to select the corresponding referent. We predicted that accuracy would be highest for non-minimal pair trials (in which the auditory words associated with the target and distractor object formed a non-minimal pair), followed by perceptually easy minimal pairs, with lowest accuracy for perceptually difficult minimal pair trials. Our results support these hypotheses: While accuracy was above chance for all pair types, in both experiments accuracy was highest for non-minimal pair trials, followed by perceptually easy and then perceptually difficult minimal pair trials. These results are the first to demonstrate the effectiveness of CSWL in adult L2 word learning. Furthermore, the difference between perceptually easy and perceptually difficult minimal pairs in both language groups suggests that the acoustic-phonetic relationship between the L1-L2 is an important factor in novel L2 word learning in ambiguous learning scenarios. We discuss the implications of our findings for L2 acquisition, cross-situational learning and encoding of phonetic detail in a foreign language.

Investigating orthographic versus auditory cross-situational word learning with online and lab-based research

“…Since object-word correspondences are not made explicit, the word-referent pairings can only be inferred across trials and therefore occurs through SL (Mulak et al, 2019). A multitude of studies have used CSWL tasks to demonstrate cross-situational learning for different types of language learners, such as infants (Escudero et al, 2016b;Smith & Yu, 2008), children (Suanda, et al, 2014) and adults (Escudero et al, 2016;Escudero et al, 2016a;Yu & Smith, 2007), bilinguals (Escudero et al, 2016), non-native listeners (Tuninetti et al, 2020), and across differing degrees of referential ambiguity (Mulak et al, 2019). It has also been shown that phonological coding ability affects CSWL efficiency (Escudero et al, 2016;Mulak et al, 2019) and that mappings are retained over time (Vlach & Sandhofer, 2014).…”

Word learning in the field: Adapting a laboratory-based task for testing in remote Papua New Guinea

“…When hearing an unknown word outside of a teaching context, it is not always clear what the referent of that word is. Cross-situational word learning paradigms test our ability to learn words in ambiguous scenarios (e.g., [ 31 , 32 , 36 ]). These paradigms begin with an ambiguous learning phase, in which more than one referent and/or auditory word is presented in each trial.…”

“…Research into XSWL supports it as a viable mechanism for learning words in the real world. Adults (e.g., [ 32 ]), young children (e.g., [ 37 ]), and non-native learners [ 36 ] can learn words via XSWL in the lab, even when words only differ by a single consonant or vowel [ 31 , 38 ], and adults can retain these mappings over time [ 39 ]. In a direct comparison between explicit word learning and XSWL, participants who learned words via explicit presentation were more accurate at test compared to those who learned them via XSWL, though word learning for all groups was above chance [ 35 ].…”

“…In this first experiment, we tested an isolated community in Papua New Guinea, basing our tasks and stimuli on those used in previous studies of explicit word learning (e.g., [ 40 ]) and XSWL (e.g., [ 36 ]), using auditory stimuli from [ 36 ] and visual stimuli from [ 40 , 41 ]. Unique to this version of the paradigm, we added a practice test between the learning and test phase using familiar words in the participants’ native language in an attempt to ensure participants were familiarized to the task.…”

Evidence-Based Design Principles for Spanish Pronunciation Teaching

“…In terms of classroom practice, perception training should include a key role for explicit instruction where "learners' attention must be explicitly drawn to the differences in the L2 and the L1 via form-focused instruction (FFI), and errors in the learners' L2 production would benefit from explicit corrective feedback" (Lee et al, 2020, p.3). However, other studies have shown that methods that rely on "implicit" or "ambiguous" learning without corrective feedback also result in significant phonetic learning at the segmental and word levels (Wanrooij et al, 2013;Escudero and Williams, 2014;Ong et al, 2017;Tuninetti et al, 2020), although for very difficult L2 contrasts, "attentive" listening (with a task that draws attention to auditory stimuli), rather than "passive" (with no task performed while listening to an array of sounds), yields better results (Ong et al, 2015). In our proposal for perception-based L2 Spanish pronunciation activities (Production of Spanish /a e o/ section), we suggest using explicit and implicit methods that emphasize the important role of both prosody and contextualized speech, as per our next two design principles.…”