Factors Affecting the Speed of Word Retrieval in Children Learning English as a Foreign Language

Ting Zhao and Victoria A. Murphy

Introduction

When a child comes to know a word, he or she must store its semantic, phonological and orthographical representations, as well as associations between these representations. The child's stored knowledge needs to be accessed in the service of language comprehension and production. The speed with which a word is retrieved hinges on and reflects the child's ability to make use of his or her semantic-lexical knowledge. Thus, identifying the possible factors underlying children's lexical accessibility would likely help understand the sources of individual differences observed in language learners' performance.

In the second language (L2) literature, a large body of research has examined the determinants of L2 speaking ability or proficiency (e.g. De Jong et al., 2013; Derwing et al., 2009; Riazantseva, 2001). Most of these studies have been conducted with adolescents and adults, whereas much less attention has been paid to primary-aged children, an L2 population of increasing importance around the world. Against this background, it is necessary to investigate L2, or more precisely English as a foreign language (EFL) children's emerging accessibility to already known words by assessing the relative contribution of several demographic and language proficiency variables (e.g. English vocabulary size, first language [L1] proficiency level and residential areas) to their retrieval speed of foreign language (FL) spoken words.

Two types of oral word production are common to FL children: naming pictures that represent objects and entities, and translating individual words from one language into another. Pictures are thought of as symbols that approximate imagistic representations in the mind, and in this sense how children name pictures could provide insight into how they perform in communication. Bilingual language use also involves an ability to translate. Every bilingual speaker has once engaged in translation, not to mention professional translators and interpreters. Additionally, translation is a pedagogical activity that often occurs in FL classes.

To sum up, the present study identified significant predictors of English lexical accessibility in picture naming and translation among EFL children and advanced theoretical and practical implications for current conceptualisations of EFL learning and teaching within input-limited contexts.

Literature Review

Describing and defining EFL children

In the course of globalisation, English has become an important world language. Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region have made English education compulsory at the primary level over the past decades. For example, in mainland China, English has been nationally recognised as a compulsory subject from the third grade onwards since September 2001 (Ministry of Education of China, 2001). Exact statistics on the number of Chinese EFL children are hard to come by, but the following figures present a rough picture. It was recently estimated that there were 379,253 primary-level Chinese teachers of English and 1,794,614 classes of third to sixth graders across the country (Ministry of Education of China, 2014). Conceivably, there must be a large population of children learning EFL outside English-speaking countries; nevertheless, this FL population has hitherto been woefully underrepresented in the L2 literature.

Bilingual learners can be defined using different criteria (see Li [2000] for a summary), such as language dominance (i.e. balanced vs. unbalanced), the sequence of acquisition (i.e. simultaneous vs. sequential), the onset age of L2 acquisition (i.e. early vs. late) and the preferential domain of language use (receptive vs. productive). According to these criteria, EFL children are a group of sequential bilingual beginners who use the L1 dominantly in almost any setting and learn EFL through formal instruction. This population, when compared to their immersion counterparts, receives much less exposure to the target language, especially outside the classroom.

Process of spoken word production

Language speakers, regardless of age, constantly access their mental lexicons. Drawing on Levelt's (1989) blueprint for the speaker, word production proceeds through conceptualisation, grammatical encoding, articulation and self-monitoring. Research on spoken production has followed two main approaches: the study of speech errors (e.g. Poulisse & Bongaerts, 1994) and the measurement of production latencies (for a review, see Jiang [2012]).

The linguistic function of naming objects and entities develops early in young children (Bates et al., 1979). As a psycholinguistic tool, picture naming has been extensively used to define different stages of speech production and to uncover the mechanisms underlying this process (e.g. Glaser, 1992; Levelt et al., 1991; Potter et al., 1984). Picture naming is typically conducted in such a way that participants are presented with a series of pictures one by one, and as a picture appears on the computer screen, they name it as accurately and rapidly as possible. There are three main stages involved in picture naming: (1) object recognition and concept activation; (2) lexical selection and activation; and (3)...