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Lexical transfer and second language morphological development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2015

Barbara Hancin-Bhatt  and
William Nagy
Barbara Hancin-Bhatt*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
William Nagy*
Affiliation:
Urbana-Champaign
*
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL 61820
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Center for the Study of Reading, 51 Gerty Drive, Champaign, IL 61820
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Abstract

This study investigates the development of two levels of morphological knowledge that contribute to Spanish-English bilingual students’ ability to recognize cognates: the ability to recognize a cognate stem within a suffixed English word, and knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes (e.g., the fact that words ending in -ty in English often have a Spanish cognate ending in -dad). A total of 196 Latino bilingual students in 4th, 6th, and 8th grade were asked to give the Spanish equivalent for English words, some of which had derivational and inflectional suffixes. The results indicated that the students’ ability to translate cognates increased with age above and beyond any increase in their vocabulary knowledge in Spanish and English. There was also marked growth in the students’ knowledge of systematic relationships between Spanish and English suffixes. Students recognized cognate stems of suffixed words more easily than noncognate stems, suggesting that, in closely related languages such as Spanish and English, cross-language transfer may play a role, not just in recognizing individual words, but also in the learning of derivational morphology.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 289 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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