Please join us for our next Brown Bag Speaker event: Wednesday, March 27, 12pm, at LRW 4018. Esther Vicente Manzanedo will present a paper titled “Does the L1 influence foreign language aptitude for English learning in multilingual children?”

Esther is a visiting international researcher at ARiEAL and the Language, Memory, and Brain Lab. She is an inaugural member of our International Scholar Award Program cohort. Esther is a postgraduate researcher working on her PhD at the University of East Anglia. This is a great opportunity for all of you to learn more about the cutting-edge work of one of our international visiting researchers!

Esther provided the following summary:

My PhD project focuses on the role of language aptitude for the acquisition of English as a foreign language in multilingual children. Working with speakers from a wide variety of L1s brought me the opportunity to examine possible differences among various first languages. Due to a relatively low number of participants and a very heterogenous sample, two language groups were considered: Chinese-English bilinguals, and an “Other” group who spoke both Chinese and English as L2s with an additional language as an L1. When observing the effect of foreign language aptitude on proficiency, a negative correlation reached significance between proficiency and a sound-symbol association task for the Chinese group; while for the Other group, also a negative correlation was found between proficiency and a language analysis task. These results are most intriguing, as perhaps the opposite would have been expected.