Anna Piasecki
PhD Research
Phone: 04 463 5233 ext 8999
Email: address
Street Address: Room 320 Von Zedlitz Building, Kelburn Pde, Kelburn Campus
Lexical Access in L2 Speakers
My research is in the area of Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. It singles out two major aspects of bilingual visual word recognition for (purely quantitative) exploration.
The first issue focuses on the nature of sub-lexical information. My aim here is to examine the extent to which language-specific information (eg in the form of language-specific cues, such as onset capitals for German nouns) can be used to speed up the processing of presented words. I will also investigate the point at which such information becomes available during the word recognition process (i.e. sub-lexical level, lexical level, etc.).
The second issue to be examined is the relative importance of phonology during visual word processing. In a first set of experimental series I will address the question whether there is a two-way interaction between orthography and phonology (cf. the bidirectional consistency effect) in bilingual visual word recognition when phonology is not explicitly required.
In a second set of experimental series, I will explore the assumption that phonology is recovered in a mandatory way from the visual input, investigating whether an L2 (English) non-word prime (eg pseudohomophone PHEAL) which is a homophone of a German (L1) word (eg VIEL) will facilitate the recognition of its L2 translation equivalent (target word; eg MUCH) to the same/similar extent as a real-word L2 prime (eg FEEL)?
Moreover, these issues will be explored in light of differences in proficiency level, contextual influence on visual processing of stimuli, as well as in the context of two languages that vary in the transparency of their print-to-sound mapping.
Research in the area of visual word recognition is generally important because the ability to recognise words is the baseline for literacy. Secondly, experimental designs investigating word recognition processes provide a vehicle for exploring other cognitive processes, such as memory structures and psychopathological disorders (eg aphasia).
Finally, the research offers crucial insight into pattern recognition and memory retrieval. Within the bilingual domain, it is important to examine bilingual visual word recognition processes because insights from such research have implications for how to teach vocabulary, or a second language in general.