Experiment 2: Read

This experiment is intended for anyone who does not speak Indonesian. This experiment is divided into two parts: Vocabulary Learning and Vocabulary Test. In the Vocabulary Learning, participants were asked to learn 15 words in Indonesian. These words appeared in pairs with their English translations. There was a time limit for this part, which was 5 seconds for each pair. At the end of this Vocabulary Learning, a review list containing all words was presented for 10 seconds before participants were asked to do the Vocabulary Test. In the Vocabulary Test, participants were asked to type-in the correct Indonesian words for the given English words. All answers were recorded and analyzed.

This experiment aims to spot and prove the presence of language transfer during language acquisition in bilingual and multilingual learners. Language transfer can be divided into 2 categories: positive transfer and negative transfer. When you learn a new language, the knowledge of your native language (L1) or your second language (L2) may have a huge impact on your learning process. The knowledge of your native language or your second language may help you to remember and to produce the target language items of the new language; this phenomenon is referred to as positive transfer.

During this experiment you probably noticed that some words are easier to learn and remember than others due to these reasons:

1. These words have cognates in your native language (L1) or in your second language (L2). For example, the word “tante” in Indonesian was borrowed from Dutch, where the word “tante” means “aunty”. This word not only has a cognate in Dutch but also in German. Because of this, for Dutch and German speakers Indonesian words like this one might be easier to learn and remember.

2. The similarity of the words' orthographical and phonological shapes help you learn them faster. For example, the Indonesian word “alergi” and the English word “allergy”.

3. You can draw the mental images or build phonological associations between foreign words and their meanings. These associations make these foreign words memorable for you (L2 is associatively linked to L1). The word “kamar” in Indonesian originally came from the Dutch word “kamer” which means "room". Russian speakers may learn this word by making associations. This process has two steps: firstly, they start by building phonological associations with a Russian word “mosquito” which sounds the same as the word “kamar”. Secondly, they continue by drawing the mental images in their mind featuring a mosquito in the bedroom to learn this word faster.

On the other hand, the knowledge of one language may also interfere with the production and understanding of another, thus this kind of transfer is categorized as negative transfer or language interference. During the vocabulary test, you probably produced some errors which came from those words that looked or sounded similar in your native language but have significantly different meanings across languages; these words are called "false friends". Let us take English as an example: Indonesian word like “air” looks exactly the same as the English word “air”. At a glance, these two words look like cognates. But do they mean the same thing? The answer is: no, they do not. Indonesian word “air” means "water", but “air” in English means “air”, as in “fresh air”. Thus, an English speaker who is not aware of this matter might produce an error.

Figure 2: Kroll’s Revised Hierarchical Model

The presence of language transfer is described in Kroll’s revised hierarchical model. There are links between the mental lexicon of your native language (L1), the mental lexicon of your second language (L2) and the concepts. These links provide opportunities for interaction between the lexicons and the conceptual store of an individual. For a bilingual, language transfer happens between L1 and L2 when the knowledge of your native language helps or interferes during your language learning. For a multilingual, the language transfer may not be presented as a process between L1 and L2, but rather between the foreign language you have already mastered (L2) and the new foreign language you are learning (L3) at the moment. Through the experiment, we can conclude that the lexicons between languages are not only linked but also interacting with each other. It can be proven by the presence of language transfer between lexicons. Thus, during language learning process we should be aware that language transfer can either help you in language acquisition or impede it through interference.

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