According to Hopp’s Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis, difficulties in second language (L2) lexical processing may lead to non-target syntactic computations. In line with this hypothesis, cognates – which are processed faster than non-cognates, as defined by the cognate facilitation effect – can ease L2 syntactic processing. In order to investigate whether cognates additionally facilitate L2 syntax learning, we had two groups of Spanish natives learn an artificial language drawing on Basque. Each group explicitly learnt a set of either Spanish–Basque cognates or non-cognates and a word order grammatical rule. Then, two sentence–picture matching tasks tested their ability to apply the rule (1) with cognates vs. non-cognates and (2) with novel cognate words. Results showed that, in both cases, cognate learners were better at applying the rule than non-cognate learners. This finding suggests that the cognate facilitation effect and its role in the Lexical Bottleneck Hypothesis can be extended from L2 processing to L2 learning. We end by mentioning possible implications of our results for second language teaching in adulthood.

中文翻译：

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同源词汇对显式 L2 规则学习的影响


根据霍普的词汇瓶颈假说，第二语言（L2）词汇处理的困难可能会导致非目标句法计算。根据这一假设，同源词（根据同源促进效应的定义，其处理速度比非同源词更快）可以简化 L2 句法处理。为了调查同源词是否额外促进第二语言语法学习，我们让两组西班牙人学习一种借鉴巴斯克语的人工语言。每个小组都明确学习了一组西班牙语-巴斯克语同源词或非同源词以及词序语法规则。然后，两个句子-图片匹配任务测试了他们应用规则（1）同源与非同源以及（2）新同源词的能力。结果表明，在这两种情况下，同源学习者比非同源学习者更擅长应用规则。这一发现表明，同源促进效应及其在词汇瓶颈假说中的作用可以从二语处理扩展到二语学习。最后，我们提到我们的结果对成人第二语言教学的可能影响。