Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian (L1) - English (L2) speakers in a free recall task

Article


Volkovyskaya, E., Raman, I. and Baluch, B. 2017. Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian (L1) - English (L2) speakers in a free recall task. Writing Systems Research. 9 (2), pp. 148-163. https://doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2017.1405136
TypeArticle
TitleAge of Acquisition (AoA) effect in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian (L1) - English (L2) speakers in a free recall task
AuthorsVolkovyskaya, E., Raman, I. and Baluch, B.
Abstract

AoA is a unique psycholinguistic variable because of its link to the semantic architecture of the mental lexicon (e.g., Brysbaert, Wijnendaele & de Deyne, 2000). The role of AoA on free recall has been examined in English (Coltheart & Winograd, 1986; Dewhurst, Hitch & Barry, 1998) and recently in Turkish (Raman, Raman, Ikier et al, under revision) with contradictory outcomes. While an overall advantage was found for late acquired items in English, the contrary was reported in Turkish. Furthermore, this effect appeared to be modulated by frequency and whether items were presented in pure or mixed lists. The present study extends Raman et al study to monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian (L1) – English (L2) speakers in order to understand the extent to which AoA affects free recall. One interesting aspect of Russian writing system is that it consists of Cyrillic and Roman letters, hence creating a shared orthographic medium in Russian-English bilinguals. Participants were allocated to either picture or word condition and subsequently to either pure list or mixed list condition. Both monolingual Russian (N=42) and bilingual (N=40) Russian (L1) – English (L2) data show a robust main effect for AoA in free recall irrespective of list type for words and for pictures and no significant interactions. Overall, early acquired words and pictures had an advantage over late acquired items. These findings are contrary to what has been reported in the literature for monolingual English speakers (Dewhurst et al, 1998) but in line with findings for Turkish (Raman et al, under revision) and will be discussed within the monolingual and bilingual theoretical frameworks.

PublisherTaylor and Francis
JournalWriting Systems Research
ISSN1758-6801
Electronic1758-681X
Publication dates
Online12 Dec 2017
Print03 Jul 2017
Publication process dates
Deposited09 Nov 2017
Accepted06 Nov 2017
Output statusPublished
Accepted author manuscript
Copyright Statement

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Writing Systems Research on 03/07/2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17586801.2017.1405136

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1080/17586801.2017.1405136
LanguageEnglish
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