Suoritusnopeus vieraan kielen taitojen automaattistumisen mittarina
Avainsanat:
L2 automatization, naming speed, psycholinguistic testingAbstrakti
The article presents the first results from my doctorate research, which I am conducting in DIALUKI project at the University of Jyväskylä. DIALUKI is an international research project that seeks to define new ways of diagnosing the development and difficulties in learning a foreign language. The project is multidisciplinary combining expertise in language assessment, FL learning and L1 learning difficulties. In 2010–2011 we conducted a cross-sectional study with several hundreds of Finnish school children. They were divided into two groups: Finnish-speakers with English as FL and Russian-speakers with Finnish as L2. The study aimed at determining how well the cognitive and psycholinguistic tests developed for diagnosing L1 are applicable to the diagnosis of foreign language. This paper concentrates on what our results reveal about the automatization of foreign language skills and its development through age and education, tested here through speed-measuring tasks. We first compared the age groups, and secondly, we studied how automatization relates to reading and writing measures. The results show that speed in cognitive tasks increased with age and/or language skill development. Speeded cognitive tasks also correlated well with reading and especially writing in a second/foreign language.
