Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning a new language involves significant vocabulary ac-quisition. Learners can accelerate this process by relying onwords with native-language overlap, such as cognates. Forbilingual third language learners, it is necessary to determinehow their two existing languages interact during novel lan-guage learning. A scaffolding account predicts transfer fromeither language for individual words, whereas an accumula-tion account predicts cumulative transfer from both languages.To compare these accounts, twenty English-German bilingualadults were taught an artificial language containing 48 novelwritten words that varied orthogonally in English and Germanwordlikeness (neighborhood size and orthotactic probability).Wordlikeness in each language improved word production ac-curacy, and similarity to one language provided the same bene-fit as dual-language overlap. In addition, participants’ memoryfor novel words was affected by the statistical distributions ofletters in the novel language. Results indicate that bilingualsutilize both languages during third language acquisition, sup-porting a scaffolding learning model.