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The age of acquisition effect in processing second language words and its relationship with the age of acquisition of the first language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2023

Jue Wang ,
Lijuan Liang  and
Baoguo Chen
Jue Wang
Affiliation:
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Lijuan Liang
Affiliation:
Bilingual Cognition and Development Lab, Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510420, China
Baoguo Chen*
Affiliation:
Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
*
*Corresponding author. Email: chenbg@bnu.edu.cn
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Abstract

The present study investigated the age of acquisition (AoA) effect in processing second language (L2) words and how it is related to the AoA of the corresponding first language (L1) words. We adopted a lexical decision task in three experiments. The filler words were orthographically illegal in Experiment 1 to elicit more word form processing, while Experiment 2 used legal fillers to shift the bias toward semantic processing. In Experiment 3, we used a larger amount of stimuli containing more longer words with legal fillers. Our results showed that L2 AoA has a weak effect at the orthographical processing level and a stable effect at the semantic processing level. The L1 AoA modulates the L2 AoA effect at the semantic processing level, which is more likely to appear in long words. These results suggest that it is important to take bilingual representation and activation into consideration to explain the L2 AoA effect.

Keywords

age of acquisitionsecond languagefirst languageword processingword length
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 355 - 376
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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