Shownotes
In this Episode, we welcome you to Season 2 of the Podcast and talk about how the language that we know can influence the way we learn other languages.
In particular, some foreign language words look really different compared to words in our native language. It may be that they include a combination of letters that are not possible in our native language. For example, "llw" in Welsh is quite frequent but for a speaker of English that will look quite unusual.
How does this impact the learning of words? Join Dr Kaitlyn and Dr Marie in this episode to learn more about it (and we revisit incidental learning which is Marie's favourite topic!).
To find out more behind-the-scenes information about this topic or about our podcast, please visit our webpage, languagescientists.dmu.ac.uk. This is where you can go to ask questions, leave comments, or even participate in our current research! We'd love to hear from YOU.
Follow Dr Zavaleta and Dr Bisson on twitter: @dr_klzavaleta and @mjbisson
Or get in touch via email: kaitlyn.zavaleta@dmu.ac.uk and marie-josee.bisson@dmu.ac.uk
Link to our research lab the Language Lab
A recent publication on Marie's work:
Bisson, M-J. (2022). Learning words with unfamiliar orthography: The role of cognitive abilities. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263122000390
Transcripts
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
If you have a connection to languages, this is the podcast for you. Whether you're a language learner, a language teacher, a language researcher, or anyone who's interested in languages.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I'm Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And I'm Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta and we are the language scientists and this is our podcast.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
We're both senior lecturers in psychology at De Montfort University, and we conduct research in the area of language learning.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Throughout this series, we hope to translate the science behind language learning into informative and useful practical advice. So sit back and enjoy. Now, today for our guest, we have Marie.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Hello.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So today's episode has a bit of a dual purpose. Marie will be discussing how our language experience can influence how we learn another language, which we're going to get to in just a minute. But we also wanted to take this opportunity to welcome you all back for series two. You all know that we alternate with interviewing our host, so we thought this would be a really nice opportunity to record our first episode together and take that chance to welcome everybody back for series two with the Language Scientist podcast.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Hurray!
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So we have five episodes coming out over the next few weeks and we're excited to share these with you all. So thanks again for your support so far and we're excited to get started. So Marie,can you tell us a little bit about what we're going to cover?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes. So in the series, we have five episodes planned. So obviously, the first one is with me and we're going to get into that in a bit. And then we have Dr. Walter Van Hoven. He's going to come in, tell us about how we keep our brains tidy or how we can manage and organise multiple languages in our brain. So I thought that would be really interesting because as we become more fluent in another language, this becomes really important. You don't want to speak the wrong language at the wrong time, as you know, because you do research in speech errors, although you love speech errors, but we don't always want them. Who is after Dr Walter in episode three.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
In episode three, we have Dr. Jiayi Wang who will be talking about pragmatics or that kind of those rules that about when you use certain words and when when they're appropriate and all those unwritten rules that are a little bit harder to kind of pinpoint.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, that's really interesting with Jiayi. And then episode four and five, we are talking to two professors. We got Professor Emma Marston and Neil Kenny, and they will talk about the current initiatives in the UK to help boost language learning.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, which is one of our focuses of our podcast. So we want to encourage folks to learn new languages and keep studying those. So it's really exciting to have them on the podcast.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So we invite everybody to visit our podcast web page at languagescientists.dmu.ac.uk
To find out more about our new episodes and really anything else will be sharing there as well.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So obviously you all know Marie, but just to kind of remind you about my fantastic co-host here. In episode one, we hear a little bit more about Marie's experience if you are perhaps interested or want a little refresh. She did her undergraduate degree in psychology at the University of Montreal in Canada and her master's and her Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Nottingham. So let's go ahead and get started on today's topic. And this is about, kind of, how the languages that we know influence how we learn another language, right?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
That's it. We kind of call this in research, or in research talk, cross linguistic orthographic similarity.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Oh, just an easy phrase.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah no, it's just we can unpack that in a minute. But I mean, there's also a cross linguistic phonological similarity that we can talk about. But yeah, so in a nutshell, cross linguistic just means across multiple languages. And then orthographic is about how the words are written, how they spelled. The patterns of letters are combinations of letters that form the words. So we can contrast that to, say, phonological, which would be how the words sound. So in my current research or the the stuff I wanted to talk about today will focus about the orthography side of things, but also obviously, really importantly, there is also the phonological side of of language, which is pretty important. Yes. So across linguistic, across languages, orthographic how the words are written or spelt, and then similarity, of course, you know how similar they are or different across different languages. So in a nutshell, this is kind of what I wanted to talk about today.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Just to unpack that a little bit, We've talked about orthography. That's the spelling and and the patterns of of letters. Phonology is just about the sounds. Can you give us an example of how we would have words in two different languages that are similar?
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yes. So, okay, so there's so there's millions of examples. But if I take one from a recent a recent study that I've just done. So I was working with native English speakers in this study and I wanted people to learn some Welsh words. So first of all, I had to ask some different people to rate those words as to how similar or different they were to native English words. So an example of a word in Welsh that was rated as being very dissimilar or different or unusual for a native English speakers is the word. Now I'm going to have to pronounce thse, this is all because we're talking about orthography in this podcast, so I'm going to pronounce these words. But of course we were looking at the spelling form, like the written form of the word. So and I am not a Welsh speaker, any Welsh speaker listening, please forgive me. Forgive me for my pronunciation. So. The word cwmwl in Welsh spelled c w m w l meaning cloud would have been rated as very dissimilar to an English word because it has combinations of letters that are just not possible in English. So we never have a w in between two consonant in English. So that word was rated as was rated as very dissimilar compared to another word. For example, in Welsh, the word for shirt is crys, so not spelt c r y s, so that's not too crazy different from English words. You know, it's a it could be an English word if you just look at it. So this is what people were doing. So I asked them to write the words and the way I did it is by presenting two words side to side on the screen, and they just had to say which one looked more like an English word. So it was a very simple task. But if you have a number of of people doing that, so say ten people, normally we would use at least ten to, to do the rating, and they rate all the words from the study. So there was 120 words that I used for that research. So once they've been judged by all the participants multiple times, then you use fancy statistical modelling and you end up with a lovely rank order from the most dissimilar word which was cwmwl and the more simpler, most similar word, which was crys in this, in this study anyways. And then we have everything in between in the middle. But yeah, there were so in Welsh in particular compared to English, there's quite often combinations of letters that just don't happen in English or sometimes they're in a position in the word where that's not possible in English. So for example, if we, if we say take the, the double l, that quite often starts a word in Welsh, which is quite frequent in the Welsh language, but definitely not frequent in the English language, So those words would be called as small, dissimilar. And so what so in this research project, or one of the main findings was that when I asked a separate sample of participant to learn some of the Welsh words through a variety of learning activities, and then we did quite a few different tests afterwards to see which words they'd learned best. What we found was that there was a strong effect of cross linguistic orthographic similarity. Yes. So how similar the words looked between Welsh and English had a big impact on the learning of the words. And so the words that are very similar, or they are rated as being similar to English words, they were much easier to learn compared to the words that were rated as very dissimilar.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
And these are two different groups of people, right? So one group of people went through and rated whether these are similar dissimilar. So we have this independent group who said, yes, this is like English or yes, this is very much not like English. And then we had the second group of participants who came in and they tried to learn the words, right. So you're saying as they've gone through and they've tried to learn it, they've said, no, it's not going through.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So by their accuracy and all their learning.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
So two different groups, definitely. We know we would always have an independent group that is just rating stimuli that you're going to use in research, and then your main research would then use a different sample of participants. Yeah, this was one obviously one of the main findings of the research, something that we were aware of before. So as you possibly imagine in your head, I was looking at more than that in that research study.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Which is sometimes we do those type types of things.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, but what was interesting in that research though, in terms of that main effect was that I had to use a continuous like a continuum of similarities or dissimilarities. So the words really ranked and they were all different in terms of the ratings of, of similarity. You can compare that to like a methodology where you would have words, you just have like two groups of words similar versus disimilar. But in my study it was on a continuum. So that's, that was kind of the novelty of that aspect. But also one of the things I was really interested in looking at with this project was the impact of obviously cross linguistic othographic similarity, and I'd say it's a bit of a mouthful sorry, or how similar or different the words look across two languages, but I wanted to look at that in the context of different learning situations. So you may remember from episode one that I'm a big advocate of incidental learning. And then for listeners that have not listened to that episode yet, you definitely should. But otherwise, if you just want a refresher. So incidental learning is a type of learning that's very natural. It's just it's how we pick up most of our words in our native language. So it's when you're you're not trying to learn words per say. You might be watching a film with subtitles, you might be listening to music, you might be reading for pleasure, you might be doing some word games, but because you're exposed to some words in another language or in your native language, depending, you'll just pick these up without intending to. It just happens. That's why it's called incidental learning. It's like your accidentally learning some words. It's a good accident. And then in comparison, we have intentional learning. So that is when you are sitting down with lists of vocabulary and you're, you know, effortfully trying to commit these words to a memory. So that's intentional learning. So in this project, I wanted to look at the effect, the impact of cross linguistic orthographic similarity on both learning situations. And so all of my learners went through two different learning tasks. It was quite a bit of a big study. It took a long time with each participant, but in the end, when I looked at the results, we saw that for both learning situation, for both incidental and intentional learning, there was an impact of the way the words looked. So the words that looked more similar to your native language, people performed better on those words. They learnt those words more easily, whether it was through an incidental learning situation or an intentional learning situation. But what was really interesting was that one of the problems with incidental learning and I don't like saying this because obviously I'm all for incidental learning, but for the words that are really dissimilar, people were at floor level for incidental learning. And in the research world that just means pretty much, the accuracy was at zero. Like for for words that were absolutely at the end of the continuum on the very dissimilar end, so the words like cwmwl that we saw, we talked about earlier, people did not just pick those words up. It's just not possible. Of course, this was the context of a short, it wasn't that short, but a shortish learning.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
It's not a whole class.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Exactly. They spent about 20 minutes doing some incidental learning and versus 20 minutes of intentional learning. So it was the same amount of time. And of course, we also find things like overall intentional learning, the accuracy was better. So, you know, when you're sitting down and trying to memorise words, it works. You know, you will do better than just picking those up, incidentally. But of course, the problem with intentional learning is that you can't learn a whole language intentionally. You have to also just, you know, experience the language, get exposure to the language in other ways, and hope that you will pick up a lot of words that way. And we do, you know, like I said, most of our native language words, we learn these incidentally. So, to come back to the cross linguistic orthographic similarity problem. So for incidental learning, people did so badly with the words that are dissimilar. That I thought that was quite problematic. Whereas for the words that are very similar, they actually did, they did well. Even for incidental learning. Intentional learning, they did even better, of course, which also pains me to say, but that was the findings. But yes, the problem was for those words from like middle to very low ratings of similarities, they were almost impossible to learn in the incidental learning situation. So, yes, so that's a problem. And it highlighted some practical implications for me in terms of, you know, what can teachers do about it, for example. So one of the things that that I want to suggest coming out of this research would be that the, you know, the little time that people have in the classroom, because that's quite precious time you don't spend that much. You know, if you think about somebody doing French at secondary school, you know, they might get one hour a week. That is not a lot of exposure to the word. Yeah, or maybe two if they're lucky depending on the school and and so that time in the classroom is very precious, very short. So if the teachers are going to spend some time doing some intentional learning activities, then I would suggest that they focus on those words that are more dissimilar, whereas the words that actually are quite plausible in the native language as well, because they the letter combinations look like they could happen in their native language, they'll probably be picked up, incidentally. So there's a really good chance that the learners will just learn them by doing other activities in the classroom, by being exposed to language. So there's not much point putting those on a list of vocabulary. Of course, you can always include a couple just to boost the learners confidence. You know, like, Oh yes, I've learned those lines really easily.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Check.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, no, but yes. So overall, that is what I would suggest in terms of practical implications. So try if those words that look very dissimilar, they should definitely go on the list of vocabulary. They might need mnemonic tricks even to try and memorise those. Yeah.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So really using your time valuably as, as a teacher to say, okay, this is the time I can focus, I can get your attention on this, really focus on those dissimilar items.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, absolutely. And I also wondered and of course, I've not done research on this but, here you go any researchers out there that are interested. But I was wondering also in terms of instructions. So as you know, I was a French teacher for a while, and so I trained as a teacher. But during my training there was nothing about, you know, teaching your learners about, you know, patterns of letters in the language that,
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
No.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
No, you don't do that. You don't talk about orthography very much or phonology either. But of course, today we're focusing on orthography. So I'll focus on that now. But I just wondered if something that teachers might be able to highlight as well. You know, so if you have particular combinations of letters or particular letters that are used very differently across a language like the W, for example, with the Welsh language, I wonder what the impact of instructions, direct instructions on those might do. So if we could facilitate the learning of those really dissimilar words just by giving a bit of direct instructions on those. So that might be an interesting project for the future.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, I think it would be. I mean, it's almost like when you're first learning to read and you do talk through all the letter combinations a little bit more in your in your native language at least.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Yeah, absolutely. Children are taught the the sound to, to spelling regularities in their native language. So why don't we, why don't we teach those to people learning in an additional language, foreign language or. Yeah,
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
Yeah, but interesting idea though. Yeah.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
My experience as the teacher, this is not something that we do. Yeah, it just kind of happens, hopefully, but it may be a bit of instructions on that might help.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
That's great. Thanks so much for sharing that with us today. I mean, I like this episode because it is really it's applicable. So, I mean, this is something that you can you could start today based on this information. A teacher could hear this and say, oh, this is something that I can, you know, institute in my classroom. I can put in to the way I'm presenting the letters, the words for this week, easily done.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
Why not? Yeah. I hope teachers out there will think I'm going to try that.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So if there are teachers out there listening and they do try this, you know, let us know. We would love to hear.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
I just I would really like to hear that direct application of the research. Yeah, that would be amazing. Yeah.
Dr Kaitlyn Zavaleta
So thanks for telling us about your research today, Marie. I think it's really cool that we get to see how this has progressed. I know you love looking at that incidental versus explicit learning, so it's really nice to see how we can apply that in different research situations and learn a little bit more. Now in the next podcast, we will be talking about how to keep our brains organised. Are languages organised and tidy with Dr. Walter Van Heuven. Now to find out a little bit more about behind the scenes information about this topic or about our podcast, please visit our web page languagescientists.dmu.ac.uk. This is where you can go to ask questions, leave comments, or even participate in some of our current research. We'd love to hear from you. So thank you for listening and thank you to De Montfort University for funding this series of the podcast. I'm Dr. Kaitlyn Zavaleta.
Dr Marie-Josee Bisson
And I'm Dr. Marie-Josee Bisson, and you've been listening to the Language Scientist podcast.
