Cuando al leer aceptación comprendemos acceptance. Estudio sobre el efecto de la frecuencia léxica en contexto de inmersión

Resumen

When reading acceptación we understand acceptance. The study on the effect of lexical frequency in the immersion context

This paper aims to study the effect of the immersion in a second language on the processing of the mother tongue, from the viewpoint of dual-route theories. Therefore, a lexical decision experiment was run where Spaniards residing in the United States had to respond to four types of critical stimuli: Spanish complex words aceptación, non-allowable morphological pseudowords acepteza, allowable pseudowords based on the corresponding English word aceptancia, from acceptance and allowable pseudowords based on the substitution of the normative suffix by an alternative one aceptamiento. The results show a significant difference in the way native speakers process complex words depending on the language of context. When they were immersed in an English context, a processing cost could be observed, as well as a correlation between the frequency of the English cognate equivalent acceptance, more frequent contextually. On the other hand, the best processing predictor for the Spaniards in Spain was the frequency of the actual Spanish word aceptación. These results give support to a contextually driven processing of our mother tongue.