Take a Load off: How Cognitive Load Relates to Phonological Fluency of Novel Sounds in EFL Learners

Learning a foreign language is a complex process that requires not only requires the acquisition of a new set of phonological and lexical items, but also developing the ability to put them to use. In order to use these newly-acquired tokens, foreign language learners must first recognize words as significant, store them in working memory (WM) long enough to encode them into long-term memory (LTM), and then reverse this process while simultaneously employing both their sensory and motor cortexes for language production. Thus, retrieval of words with novel phonemes creates a heavy cognitive load on the working memory (WM) of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. Our study investigated phonemic fluency and WM capacity in EFL learners. Participants were 64 native Arabic speakers enrolled in an English-medium university. Phonological fluency was tested using a phoneme found in both English and Arabic as the control condition (/f/), whereas a phoneme found in English but not Arabic was used as the test condition (/p/). Results showed significant relationships between phonological fluency of the novel consonant /p/ and measures of WM capacity, suggesting that greater cognitive load may be associated with the retrieval of words beginning with a novel phoneme. Thus, EFL learners may benefit from instruction targeting phonological awareness of novel phonemes to reduce the cognitive load in foreign language processing.