Incidental changes in orthographic processing in the native language as a function of learning a new language late in life
Data
2021Egilea
Borragan, Maria
Casaponsa, Aina
Antón, Eneko
Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
Maria Borragan, Aina Casaponsa, Eneko Antón & Jon Andoni Duñabeitia (2021) Incidental changes in orthographic processing in the native language as a function of learning a new language late in life, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 36:7, 814-823, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2020.1784446
Laburpena
Acquiring a second alphabetic language also entails learning a new set of orthographic rules and
specific patterns of grapheme combinations (namely, the orthotactics). The present longitudinal
study aims to investigate whether orthotactic sensitivity changes over the course of a second
language learning programme. To this end, a group of Spanish monolingual old adults
completed a Basque language learning course. They were tested in different moments with a
language decision task that included pseudowords that could be Basque-marked, Spanishmarked
or neutral. Results showed that the markedness effect varied as a function of second
language acquisition, showing that learning a second language changes the sensitivity not only
to the orthographic patterns of the newly acquired language, but to those of the native
language too. These results demonstrate that the orthographic representations of the native
language are not static and that experience with a second language boosts markedness
perception in the first language