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Multilingual Cognition and Language Use: Processing and typological perspectives
Edited by Luna Filipović and Martin Pütz
[Human Cognitive Processing 44] 2014
► pp. 287–308

L1-based prototypicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning

| Beijing Normal University
| University of Hong Kong

One issue in multilingual cognition is whether there is a unitary or two conceptual systems that map onto different languages. This chapter addresses this issue by exploring whether and how prototypicality effects manifest in L2 vocabulary learning. In our two-step study we first used free sense-listing and prototypicality-rating tasks to locate cultural variations in prototypicality of the senses of 17 polysemous words between Chinese and English. Then we carried out a no-cue-English-word-learning-and-immediate-cued-recall task to examine whether Chinese participants would recall better and faster newly-learned English word senses that are prototypical in Chinese but not in English. The existence of L1-based prototypicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning are confirmed, providing support for the unitary conceptual model in L2 learning.

Keywords: Chinese, English, polysemous words, second language acquisition, unitary conceptual model
Published online: 10 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hcp.44.11xia
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