Exploring cognition processes in second language acquisition: the case of cognates and false-friends in EST
نویسنده
چکیده
This article explores one aspect of the processing perspective in L2 learning in an EST context: the processing of new content words, in English, of the type cognates and false friends, by Spanish speaking engineering students. The paper does not try to offer a comprehensive overview of language acquisition mechanisms, but rather it is intended to review more narrowly how our conceptual systems, governed by intricately linked networks of neural connections in the brain, make language development possible, creating, at the same time, some L2 processing problems. The case of cognates and false friends in specialised contexts is brought here to illustrate some of the processing problems that the L2 learner has to confront, and how mappings in the visual, phonological and semantic (conceptual) brain structures function in second language processing of new vocabulary.
منابع مشابه
Disambiguation of partial cognates
Cognates – words that have similar spelling and meaning in two or more languages – can accelerate vocabulary acquisition and facilitate the reading comprehension task. A student has to pay attention to the pairs of words that look and sound similar but have different meanings – false-friend pairs, and especially to pairs of words that share meanings in some but not all contexts – partial cognat...
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