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RESPONSE TIME VARIABILITY SIGNATURES OF NOVEL WORD LEARNING

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 March 2017

Katya Solovyeva Open the ORCID record for Katya Solovyeva [Opens in a new window]  and
Robert DeKeyser
Katya Solovyeva*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
Robert DeKeyser
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, College Park
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Katya Solovyeva, 2321 Symons Hall, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. Email: kss@umd.edu
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Abstract

Response time variability and its changes over time have been interpreted as indicative of levels of knowledge automatization. Predominantly, only declines in variability have been examined over the course of practice and growing second language proficiency. We discuss possible scenarios that may involve increasing, rather than declining variability, such as the establishment of new memory representations. We present repeated-measures lexical decision data on novel words encountered incidentally in a lexical decision task, which show increased variability as familiarity increases. Similar patterns were observed in our reanalyses of data from other novel word learning experiments with task demands different from ours: auditory presentation and a posttest after seven days (Brown & Gaskell, 2014), as well as picture-matching and production tests (Bartolotti & Marian, 2014). Jointly, these results suggest that when no prior representation of a word exists, increased variability may index learning during its initial stages.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 225 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

This work was supported in part by NSF-IGERT award DGE-0801465 to Colin Phillips. The authors thank Helen Brown for providing pertinent data for the calculation of the metrics used in this paper; Mike Long, Stephen O’Connell, and Ilina Kachinskse for comments on earlier drafts; and the University of Maryland Graduate Writing Center and Dr. Linda Macrí. We are grateful for the feedback from anonymous reviewers, whose comments resulted in considerable improvements to the paper.

References

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