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Academics Seek Bilingual Volunteers For Language Study

September 03, 2002

Psychologists and linguists at the University of Edinburgh are recruiting Spanish; Japanese and native English-speaking adults for a research project, which will help understand how non-native languages, are learned and stored in the memory. The research aims to identify certain pitfalls in spelling, both in native and non-native speakers, and explain why these happen. The volunteers will be tested on a variety of language skills in English, including reading, writing, listening and speaking.

Dr Robert Hartsuiker of the University’s Psychology Department explained: “This project is really based on the observation that speakers of English sometimes make spelling errors with words that sound the same, but are spelled differently, such as ‘their’ instead of ‘there’ and ‘two’ instead of ‘too’. The way a word sounds can also lead to mistakes in reading. For example, if native English speakers read ‘rows’ and are then asked whether they just saw the name of a flower, they often say ‘yes’, because ‘rows’ sounds like ‘rose’. If they do say ‘no’ they are really slow to respond, which suggests that the sounds of words are important in both reading and spelling, even for adults. This is a rather controversial idea, because some theories claim that proficient language users don’t necessarily access the sounds of words when they read or write.”

Dr Mits Ota, of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, added: “ We will use this phenomenon to investigate the way very proficient bilinguals store words and speech sounds in memory. The Japanese and Spanish languages have a different system of speech sounds from English, and from each other. Our theory is that even if a Japanese or Spanish speaker is extremely fluent in English, their memory codes for some words will be qualitatively different from the memory code of a native speaker. By comparing the performance of fluent bilinguals with a control group of people whose first language is English, we will get a better understanding of the way bilinguals represent their second language in memory.”

The research team is currently designing materials for the study, which will involve a series of four computer-based language tasks. Volunteers will receive small payments for their help, and will require to attend three half-hour sessions at the University. Bilinguals should have Spanish or Japanese as their first language, and be proficient in English.

The project may be followed by similar research involving other languages.

Edinburgh, University of