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Reading in English: German in childhood and Latin in adolescence
Poster Session B, Friday, October 25, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
To date, few studies have looked at the role of word etymology in lexical access. To fill this gap, we created a database of over 20,000 English words that included reaction times and other variables that are important for word recognition. Three different results will be presented. First, analysis of age of acquisition shows that early learned words have mostly Germanic origins whereas later learned words have mostly Latin origin. Second, results from behavioral data reveal that etymology accounts for reaction times and accuracy during a word reading task in native and nonnative English speakers. Third, phonological network analyses revealed that the giant component (largest connected subgraph) had an overrepresentation of Germanic words. Furthermore, there was additional segregation into Germanic majority and Latin majority communities. Finally, Latin-based words, on the other hand, were in several smaller clusters. Taken together these findings support a bidialectal view of English in that Germanic words serve as the base of lexical processing starting in childhood and persist until adulthood. Implications for models of the behavioral and the neural bases of reading in English will be discussed.
Topic Areas: Reading, Multilingualism