The automatic cognate form assumption: Evidence for the parasitic model of vocabulary development

By Christopher J. Hall. 2002

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Parasitic Hypothesis, formulated to account for early stages of vocabulary/L/development in second language learners, claims that on initial exposure/L/to a word, learners automatically exploit existing lexical material in the L1/L/or L2 in order to establish an initial memory representation. At the level of/L/phonological and orthographic form, it is claimed that significant overlaps/L/with existing forms, i.e. cognates, are automatically detected and new forms/L/are subordinately connected to them in the mental lexicon. In the study reported here, English nonwords overlapping with real words in Spanish (pseudocognates), together with noncognate nonwords, were presented to Spanish-speaking learners of English in a word familiarity task. Participants reported significantly higher levels of familiarity with the pseudocognates and showed greater consistency in providing translations for them. These results, together with measures of the degree of overlap between nonword stimuli and translations, were interpreted as evidence for the automatic use of cognates in early word learning.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c2ed9e0791e5171134d26dc02b14f4edf7fe300

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. N. Schmitt
2. Nany Girsai
3. B. Laufer
4. Wei Chen
5. A. D. de Groot

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

1. N. Schmitt
2. E. Peters
3. B. Laufer
4. Nany Girsai
5. Stuart Webb
6. Wei Chen
7. A. D. de Groot
8. A. Pellicer‐Sánchez

Citations in the corpus

• Form-focused Instruction in Second Language Vocabulary Learning: A Case for Contrastive Analysis and Translation (2008, background): “A similar view was expressed by Blum and Levenston (1978), Ringbom (1983), and later by Ellis (1997), Hall (2002), and Jiang (2004).”
• Effects of Stimulus Characteristics and Background Music on Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning and Forgetting (2006, background): “, Laufer, 1997), the relation (similarity, difference, or a mixture of both similarity and difference) between the first or native language (L1) lexical forms and the corresponding FL lexical forms (e.g., Granger, 1993; Hall, 2002; Laufer & Eliasson, 1993; Lotto & de Groot, 1998; Talamas, Kroll, & D”
• Review article: Instructed second language vocabulary learning (2008, background): “Hulstijn (1992) found that glosses helped to prevent learners from making erroneous guesses about unknown words, which is important because learners seem reluctant to change their guesses once made (Haynes, 1993). Moreover, Hulstijn, Hollander, and Greidanus (1996) found that L2 readers with margina”
• Semantic Transfer and Its Implications for Vocabulary Teaching in a Second Language (2004, background): “Other space in the entry is empty (see also De Bot, Paribakht, & Wesche, 1997; Hall, 2002; Meara, 1984).”