*Part of the 2012 Second Language Research Forum "Building Bridges Between Disciplines: SLA in Many Contexts"

This lecture describes a body of work exploring translation ambiguity, which occurs when a word in one language has more than one translation into another language. For example, the Spanish word "muñeca" translates to both "doll" and "wrist" in English. Our research demonstrates that such ambiguity leads to: (1) slower translation, (2) less accurate translation, and (3) less robust word learning. Furthermore, knowledge that a pair of words share a translation in a later-learned second language impacts the level of perceived relatedness between those words in a first language. For example, native English speakers who learn Spanish as a second language may consider the words "doll" and "wrist" to be more related than native English speakers who do not know Spanish. These findings will be discussed in terms of the ways that the relationship among word meanings across languages influences language learning, processing, and representation.

Natasha Tokowicz is currently Associate Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. She received a B.A. in psychology with a minor in Spanish from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 1995. She then earned Master's (1997) and Doctoral degrees (2000) in cognitive psychology at Penn State University. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh prior to beginning her faculty position. Her research focuses on the cognitive processes related to adult second language learning and use. One line of this research focuses on translation ambiguity, which occurs when a word has multiple translations across languages. Another line of this research focuses on second language morpho-syntactic processing in relation to the similarities and differences between the native language and the second language. She uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in addition to behavioral measures, such as reaction time and accuracy, to examine these issues.