On Wednesday 2 April, Dr Vikki Janke from the Department of English Language & Linguistics will be giving a talk at Bangor University as part of its Linguistics Circle Lecture Series.
The talk is entitled ‘False Friends: The Effects of Mismatching in Morphological Complexity on a Backward Lexical Translation Task’, and explores a study of whether learners of a second language rely on upon L1 (their first or native language) when processing their L2 (the second language). It does this by focusing on ‘false cognates’, words which share similar form, but have different meanings. These words trigger translation errors in learners who, for example, confuse the French ‘librairie’ with English ‘library’ instead of accessing the correct translation ‘bookshop’. Using a backward lexical translation paradigm (L2 to L1), the study manipulated the levels of morphological complexity of false-cognate pairs and examined the repercussions this has on the false-friend effect. Progress in the understanding of the false-friend effect is important, as it sheds light on the way in which words are stored and accessed in the bilingual’s lexicon.
The talk will take place at 4pm. For more information, please see the webpage here: www.bangor.ac.uk/linguistics/about/seminars.php.en