HL2C-SLLAT Seminar: Manuel Pulido (Pennsylvania State)

Title: Learning and generalization of L1-L2 incongruent collocations: Evidence from behavior and brain potentials

Presenter(s): Manuel Pulido (Pennsylvania State)

Date: Wednesday 1 March 2023, 5:00pm to 6:00pm.

How to join: The seminars are free to attend. Simply sign up to the HL2C Mailing List or to the SLLAT mailing list to receive the link to join us via Microsoft Teams link. You do not need a Teams account to access the talk.

About: This is a joint event, co-organized by the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C) and the Second Language Learning and Teaching (SLLAT) Research Group.

Abstract:

A growing number of studies indicates that L2 collocations are important for improving learners' proficiency and fluency, but also that L1-L2 incongruent collocations are hard to acquire. In this talk I will present evidence from three studies that investigated the association between retrieval practice conditions, learning and generalization of incongruent collocations. Grounded in recent proposals of desirable difficulties in vocabulary learning (Bjork & Kroll, 2015), studies 1 and 2 tested the hypothesis that, in order to process and retrieve L2 collocations efficiently, speakers must learn to inhibit the native language equivalents. A third experiment examined whether learners are able to generalize their recently acquired knowledge of L1-L2 incongruent collocations, and provided evidence that generalization occurs through both within- and cross-language lexical connections. Taken together, the evidence from behavior and ERPs suggests that, under the appropriate conditions, learners may regulate language co-activation to their advantage when acquiring L2 collocations.