The research project reveals that the underlying mechanism responsible for this is competition between foreign languages. “This competition can arise in two ways,” explains PhD student Anne Mickan, who will defend her research and accompanying PhD thesis at the Faculty of Social Sciences on 11 March. She explains that competition between languages arises either when people start using a previously learned foreign language, or when they start learning a new one. “This competition can lead to people forgetting a foreign language,” argues Mickan.
Learning is forgetting
The study participants were Dutch native speakers aged 18 years to 30 years. In the first stage, participants learned some Spanish words. They were then asked to use these same words in either English or in Dutch. Mickan explains that her respondents found it more difficult to later recall the Spanish words if they had used the equivalent Dutch or English words in the interim. This was especially true for respondents who were asked to use English words in the interim. “Apparently, it is especially the use of other foreign languages that negatively impacts your memory of recently learned foreign words,” concludes Mickan. In another research project she showed that the opposite is also true: learning new Spanish words made it harder for participants to subsequently recall the corresponding English words.
A different context
The PhD student was able to reach these conclusions by distancing herself from the research methodology commonly used in studying language forgetting. “The question of how people forget a language is usually studied by looking at people in a natural environment,” she explains. This set-up allows researchers to establish whether or not people are forgetting a language, but not why it happens, explains Mickan. This is why she exchanged this realistic context for a laboratory setting in her own research. “I wanted to see whether and how I could make my participants forget words from a foreign language,” she says. She argues that this is a big step towards understanding how languages are forgotten and believes that her research can be further built on. Future research in her field might, for example, investigate whether this kind of competition between languages is stronger between languages that are similar, like Spanish and Italian, than between languages that don’t resemble each other at all.
Text: Delphine Broasca. This article previously appeared on the website of ANS. Photography: Tessa Kavanagh via Pixabay.