Von Holzen, K., Schnieders, M., & Hopp, H. (2023). Use of L1 lexical overlap in initial foreign-language speech segmentation. Presented at the 2023 Conference Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), San Sebastian, Spain. doi = 10.6084/m9.figshare.24041904.Adults initially struggle to segment word forms from continuous speech in a foreign language (FL), but do better when words partially overlap in form and meaning with their L1 equivalents (i.e. cognates: English: /kraʊn/; German: /kroːnə/; noncognate: English: /skɪn/; German: /haʊ̯t/; Shoemaker & Rast, 2013). We examine whether L1 lexical overlap facilitates the segmentation of English speech among German 1st and 2nd graders before they receive instruction in English.English-German cognate and noncognate word pairs (n = 160) were embedded into an English sentence frame (She reduced her crownC/skinNC mursk to poverty). Students listened to the sentence followed by an isolated probe-word and indicated via button press whether they heard the probe word in the sentence.A general-linear-mixed-model on 45 1st and 2nd graders revealed above-chance performance for all target words (p’s < .0001), indicating students detected and segmented the target words. D-primes were not significantly different between cognate and non-cognate words (p = .19; Figure 1), suggesting that these young students do not yet transfer knowledge from their L1 to segment words in an unknown FL. In the full sample, we will also examine the role of individual differences in L1 knowledge and phonological awareness.