The Interaction of Language Transfer and Language Processing in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

Project SCHOLAR (Statistical Consulting Help for Organizational Leaders and Academic Researchers) is a student statistical consulting service at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO). SCHOLAR students work under the supervision of faculty from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics on various projects submitted from other researchers from both on and off campus. A faculty member from The English Department at UCO partnered with the students in Project SCHOLAR to study the influence of first language in learning a second language. Participants consisted of native speakers of English as the control group and native speakers of Arabic and Korean as the experimental groups. The participants were divided into three subgroups: elementary, intermediate, and advanced, based on level of English proficiency. The participants were then asked to rate a series of sentences on a 4-point scale from based on the correctness of the sentence. The reading times of the individual words will be used to develop a linear regression model predicting reading time from word length. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) will then be performed to test for differences in first language and English proficiency with respect to mean residuals from the regression model. Logistic and/or ordinal regression will also be performed to test for differences with respect to the sentence ratings.