Posted on 13 May 2015
For literate speakers of alphabetised languages, words are both salient (they come in neat packages, demarcated by white space in text) and functionally transparent (they serve to label our physical and conceptual reality). They also constitute a readily understandable, if slightly tedious, challenge for second language learners: thousands of new labels must be learned for mostly pre-existing concepts. However, there is growing evidence that words are neither necessarily discrete nor perhaps always primary units of meaning: converging evidence from studies of non-alphabetised languages, and experimental and corpus examinations of multi-word units, suggest that meaning maps onto units smaller, larger, and other than the word. This reframing of the learning problem increases the pedagogical challenge for the second language learner, especially within time-limited instructional contexts.
In order to make useful predictions for learning and teaching, we need to advance our understanding of the relation between the mental lexicon and the language we produce and comprehend. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers employing a variety of techniques, and foster a dialogue on questions such as: what can cross-linguistic comparisons tell us about possible lexical architectures? What role does the L1 play in the bilingual lexicon? How are multi-word units processed in a first and second language? How can the special characteristics of second language learning inform our understanding of general processes of inference and induction?
Please find below presentations from this workshop which we hope will be of interest to a wide spectrum of students and professionals in language education, second language research, psychology and linguistics.
Beyond counters in the head: uncertainty and negtive evidence in L2 lexical learning: Cylcia Bolibaugh (PDF , 1,689kb)
“Thumbing our noses” at the notion of only singles words being words: Kathy Conklin & Gareth Carrol (MS PowerPoint , 3,874kb)
The Interaction of Semantics and Emotions in SLA: Ton Dijkstra and Agnes Sianipar (MS PowerPoint , 13,384kb)
Chinese “words”: James Myers (MS PowerPoint , 660kb)