Gaele, Claudia and Branzi, Francesca and Chang, Ya-Ning and Alexopoulou, Theodora (2021) The impact of L2 proficiency on cross-language influence during L2 word processing. In: Cambridge Language Sciences Annual Symposium 2021, 2021-11-23.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We investigated the relationship between L2 proficiency and the language control strategies employed during L2 word-processing to cope with cross-language interference. Our main hypothesis is that proactive inhibition of the non-target language (L1) is the best cognitive strategy to optimise L2 performance when L1 and L2 lexical/phonological representations do not overlap. This strategy should be especially implemented by L2 high proficient individuals. We tested a group of native speakers of Chinese (L1) with various levels of proficiency in L2 English in a task that required to decide whether English words presented in pairs were related in meaning or not. Crucially, L2 learners were unaware of the fact that half of the words concealed a character repetition when translated into Chinese which allowed us to measure the activation of L1 phonological representations. Contrary to our predictions, we found that higher proficiency correlated with higher L1 activation.