Isabelle Darcy, 4:00pm Tuesday March 3rd
Indiana University
Tuesday, March 3rd
Swift 107
4:00pm (Reception to follow)
Learning to forget? Phonological updates in the bilingual mental lexicon.
Understanding the structure of the mental lexicon, how lexical entries are created, how words are stored, accessed, added (learned) or removed (forgotten), is a central topic in psycholinguistics. While we know relatively well how the mental lexicon works for one’s native language, the same cannot be said for second language (L2). Psycholinguists have yet to understand the way the bilingual mental lexicon works, and in particular, little is known about how bilinguals store the phonological form of words (their pronunciation) in the corresponding lexical entry in long-term memory.
In this talk I will outline research conducted in my lab to understand how the phonological form of words is learned in a L2. Using a variety of experimental approaches, we investigate the mechanisms by which new L2 words are initially stored in the long-term memory, how they are accessed during speech comprehension, and how they are updated as a bilingual’s proficiency develops.