Affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage, even with inflected words, even in a morphologically rich language

This paper investigates whether affixal homonymy, the phenomenon that one affix form serves two or more semantic/syntactic functions, affects lexical processing of inflected words in a similar way for a morphologically rich language such as Finnish as for morphologically restricted languages such as Dutch and English. For the latter two languages, there is evidence that affixal homonymy triggers full-form storage for inflected words (Bertram, R., Schreuder, R., and Baayen, R. H. (in press). The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Sereno and Jongman (1997). Processing of English inflectional morphology. Memory and Cognition, 25, 425-437). Two visual lexical decision experiments show the same pattern for Finnish. Apparently, the substantially richer morphology in Finnish does not prevent full-form storage for inflected words when the affix is homonymic.     

L1 effects on the processing of inflected nouns in L2

This study investigated the effect of L1 on the recognition of L2 Swedish inflected nouns. Two groups of late L2 learners with typologically very different native languages, Hungarian (agglutinative) and Chinese (isolating), participated in a visual lexical decision experiment. The target words were matched inflected vs. monomorphemic nouns from three frequency levels. The Hungarian group showed a morphological processing cost (longer reaction times for the inflected words) for low and medium frequency words but not for high frequency words, suggesting morphological decomposition of low and medium frequency Swedish inflected nouns. In contrast, for the Chinese group the reaction times of the inflected vs. monomorphemic words were similar at all frequency levels, indicating full-form processing of all the inflected nouns. This cross-language difference suggests that L1 can exert an effect on the morphological processing in L2. The application of full-form processing for the Swedish inflected nouns in the Chinese group might reflect strategy transfer from their isolating native language to Swedish.     

Metalinguistic Awareness and Reading Performance: A Cross Language Comparison

The study examined two questions: (1) do the greater phonological awareness skills of billinguals affect reading performance; (2) to what extent do the orthographic characteristics of a language influence reading performance and how does this interact with the effects of phonological awareness. We estimated phonological metalinguistic abilities and reading measures in three groups of first graders: monolingual Hebrew speakers, bilingual Russian–Hebrew speakers, and Arabic-speaking children. We found that language experience affects phonological awareness, as both Russian–Hebrew bilinguals and the Arabic speakers achieved higher scores on metalinguistic tests than Hebrew speakers. Orthography affected reading measures and their correlation with phonological abilitites. Children reading Hebrew showed better text reading ability and significant correlations between phonological awareness and reading scores. Children reading Arabic showed a slight advantage in single word and nonword reading over the two Hebrew reading groups, and very weak relationships between phonological abilities and reading performance. We conclude that native Arabic speakers have more difficulty in processing Arabic orthography than Hebrew monolinguals and bilinguals have in processing Hebrew orthography, and suggest that this is due to the additional visual complexity of Arabic orthography.     

Effects of speed of word processing on semantic access: the case of bilingualism

Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to count the number of letters in pseudowords and actively disregard words. They were not explicitly told that pairs of words in immediate succession were embedded and could either be semantically related or not. We expected that slower word processing in bilinguals would result in semantic access indexed by semantic priming. As expected, bilinguals showed significant semantic priming, indexed by an N400 modulation, whilst monolinguals did not. Moreover, bilinguals were slower in performing the task. The results suggest that bilinguals cannot discriminate between pseudowords and words without accessing semantic information whereas monolinguals can dismiss English words on the basis of subsemantic information.     

Not just semantics: Strong frequency and weak cognate effects on semantic association in bilinguals

To investigate the possibility that knowledge of two languages influences the nature of semantic representations, bilinguals and monolinguals were compared in a word association task. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced less typical responses relative to monolinguals when given cues with a very common associate (e.g., given bride, bilinguals said “dress” instead of “groom”). In Experiment 2, bilinguals produced responses as typical as those of monolinguals when given cues with high-frequency associates, but not when given cues with lowfrequency associates. Bilinguals’ responses were also affected, to a certain extent, by the cognate status of the stimulus word pairs: They were more similar to monolinguals’ responses when the cue and its strongest associate were both cognates (e.g., minute-second is minuto-segundo in Spanish), as opposed to both being noncognates. Experiment 3 confirmed the presence of a robust frequency effect on bilingual but not on monolingual association responses. These findings imply a lexical locus for the bilingual effect on association responses and reveal the association task to be not quite as purely semantic as was previously assumed.     

Do French–English Bilingual Children Gesture More Than Monolingual Children?

Previous studies have shown that bilingual adults use more gestures than English monolinguals. Because no study has compared the gestures of bilinguals and monolinguals in both languages, the high gesture rate could be due to transfer from a high gesture language or could result from the use of gesture to aid in linguistic access. In this study we tried to distinguish between those causes by comparing the gesture rate of 10 French–English bilingual preschoolers with both 10 French and 10 English monolinguals. All were between 4 and 6 years of age. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and tell the story back. The results showed the bilingual children gestured more than either group of monolinguals and at the same rate in both French and English. These results suggest that that the bilinguals were not gesturing because they were transferring the high gesture rate from one language to another. We argue that bilinguals might gesture more than monolinguals to help formulate their spoken message.     

Language learning and control in monolinguals and bilinguals

Parallel language activation in bilinguals leads to competition between languages. Experience managing this interference may aid novel language learning by improving the ability to suppress competition from known languages. To investigate the effect of bilingualism on the ability to control native-language interference, monolinguals and bilinguals were taught an artificial language designed to elicit between-language competition. Partial activation of interlingual competitors was assessed with eye-tracking and mouse-tracking during a word recognition task in the novel language. Eye-tracking results showed that monolinguals looked at competitors more than bilinguals, and for a longer duration of time. Mouse-tracking results showed that monolinguals' mouse movements were attracted to native-language competitors, whereas bilinguals overcame competitor interference by increasing the activation of target items. Results suggest that bilinguals manage cross-linguistic interference more effectively than monolinguals. We conclude that language interference can affect lexical retrieval, but bilingualism may reduce this interference by facilitating access to a newly learned language.     

Processing differences between nouns,adjectives, and verbs

Summary Processing differences were investigated for nouns, adjectives, and verbs in Serbocroatian, a language that depends strongly on inflection to convey grammatical information. Four lexical decision experiments were run. Two of them inspected processing of inflected forms of nouns, demonstrating analogous processing for both singular and plural forms. Processing of the nominative case was faster for both grammatical numbers. Reaction times for the various case forms were not related to their respective frequencies of occurrence. Adjectival processing, on the other hand, gave no privileged role to the nominative case and the inflected form frequency had a strong influence. Similarly, verbs also showed frequency-based processing. An explanation was proposed, suggesting that the organization of inflectional processing is dependent on the number of inflectional alternatives available to a given word.This research was supported by National Institute of Health (USA) grants HD-08495 to the University of Belgrade and HD-01994 to the Haskins Laboratories.     

Morphological priming in the German mental lexicon.

We present results from cross-modal priming experiments on German participles and noun plurals. The experiments produced parallel results for both inflectional systems. Regular inflection exhibits full priming whereas irregularly inflected word forms show only partial priming: after hearing regularly inflected words (-t participles and -s plurals), lexical decision times on morphologically related word forms (presented visually) were similar to reaction times for a base-line condition in which prime and target were identical, but significantly shorter than in a control condition where prime and target were unrelated. In contrast, prior presentation of irregular words (-n participles and -er plurals) led to significantly longer response times on morphologically related word forms than the prior presentation of the target itself. Hence, there are clear priming differences between regularly and irregularly inflected German words. We compare the findings on German with experimental results on regular and irregular inflection in English and Italian, and discuss theoretical implications for single versus dual-mechanism models of inflection.     

母语者与二语者屈折词和派生词语素加工的差异

语素是构成词汇的最小功能单位,是能够表达独立语义的最小成分。语素加工是指基于一定的构词规则,将语素复杂词汇进一步分解为多个语素,通过加工和重组语素,建构起对整词意义的理解。有关英语语素加工的研究发现,不仅母语者和二双语者的加工模式存在很大差异,对于屈折和派生这两种英语中重要的语素复杂词汇,其加工模式也存在较大差异,本文重点讨论了英语母语者与英语二语者对屈折和派生词加工模式的差异、成因以及影响因素。最后提出了今后需要进一步研究的问题。     

Brain responses to semantic incongruity in bilinguals

Event-related potentials were examined in the first and second languages of bilinguals, and in monolinguals. Stimuli were anomalous sentences presented one word at a time on a CRT monitor. The principal dependent measure was the N400 component, and an accompanying frontal negativity, which provided an estimate of the amount of time the nervous system takes to determine the semantic incongruity of a given word. The results indicate that N400 latency is slightly, but significantly, delayed in bilinguals, with monolinguals having the shortest mean N400 latency, the first language of bilinguals next, and the second language of bilinguals longest. The frontal negativity varied in amplitude somewhat independently of the parietal N400. The amplitude of the frontal negativity was sometimes reduced in the second language, tending to be smaller in those subjects who used their second language the least. Neither N400 nor the frontal negativity varied as a function of age of acquisition of the second language. The results are discussed with reference to the relative automaticity of language in bilinguals, and the sensitivity of N400 to variations in the automaticity of language processing.     

Representation of inflected signs from American Sign Language in short-term memory

In order to help illuminate general ways in which language users process inflected items, two groups of native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) were asked to recall lists of inflected and uninflected signs. Despite the simultaneous production of base and inflection in ASL, subjects transposed inflections across base forms, recalling the base forms in the correct serial positions, or transposed base forms, recalling the inflections in the correct serial positions. These rearrangements of morphological components within lists occurred significantly more often than did rearrangements of whole forms (base plus inflection). These and other patterns of errors converged to suggest that ASL signers remembered inflected signs componentially in terms of a base and an inflection, much as the available evidence suggests is true for users of spoken language. Componential processing of regularly inflected forms would thus seem to be independent of particular transmission systems and of particular mechanisms for combining lexical and inflectional material.     

Processing of English inflectional morphology

The present paper explores the representation of inflectional morphology in the English lexicon. There has been a long-standing debate about how these inflectional relationships might be involved during on-line processing. Inflected forms may be derived from an uninflected base form by rule application; by contrast, both regular and irregular inflection may be treated in the same way, with morphological patterns emerging from mappings between base and inflected forms. The present series of experiments investigated these issues using a lexical decision task. The first experiment showed that response latencies to nouns were significantly shorter than those to verbs. A possible explanation for these results can be found in differences in inflectional structure between English nouns and verbs. Namely, the relative frequency of uninflected compared with inflected forms is greater for nouns than for verbs. Two additional experiments compared noun stimuli with different inflectional structures. In all cases, differences in response latencies were predicted by the frequency of the surface form, whether uninflected or inflected. The pattern of results lends support for a unitary associative system for processing regular inflection of nouns in English and argues against the view that regular inflected plurals are derived by rule from a single, uninflected lexical entry.     

On the Functional Equivalence of Monolinguals and Bilinguals in "Monolingual Mode": The Bilingual Anticipation Effect in Picture-Word Processing

Previous evidence indicates that bilinguals are slowed when an unexpected language switch occurs when they are reading aloud. This anticipation effect was investigated using a picture-word translation task to compare English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals functioning in "monolingual mode." Monolinguals and half of the bilinguals drew pictures or wrote English words for picture or English word stimuli; the remaining bilinguals drew pictures or wrote Spanish words for picture or Spanish word stimuli. Production onset latency was longer in cross-modality translation than within-modality copying, and the increments were equivalent between groups across stimulus and production modalities. Assessed within participants, bilinguals were slower than monolinguals under intermixed but not under blocked trial conditions. Results indicate that the bilingual anticipation effect is not specific to language-mixing tasks. More generally, stimulus-processing uncertainty prevents establishment of a "base" symbolic-system procedure (concerning recognition, production, and intervening translation) and the inhibition of others. When this uncertainty is removed, bilinguals exhibit functional equivalence to monolinguals.     

Laterality differences for word identification in bilinguals

Twenty-three Spanish-English bilinguals were tachistoscopically presented with four-letter common nouns. They viewed 20 word pairs, first in their native language, then in the other, for 40 msec under simultaneous bilateral exposure. This paradigm has previously shown a strong right visual field and therefore left hemisphere superiority for words in a single language. The results show a word identification advantage in the right visual field. This indicates a left hemisphere advantage for processing of both languages, regardless of which was learned first. There are nevertheless wide individual differences in the number of bilinguals showing the expected asymmetry, as compared with monolinguals. There may be a trend, therefore, for less unilaterality of language function in bilinguals, although both languages are seen as being equally lateralized.     

Neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a morphologically rich language: an fMRI study

By employing visual lexical decision and functional MRI, we studied the neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a highly inflected language (Finnish) where most inflected noun forms elicit a consistent processing cost during word recognition. This behavioral effect could reflect suffix stripping at the visual word form level and/or subsequent meaning integration at the semantic-syntactic level. The first alternative predicts increased activation for inflected vs. monomorphemic words in the left occipitotemporal cortex while the second alternative predicts left inferior frontal gyrus and/or left posterior temporal activation increases. The results show significant activation effects in the latter areas. This provides support for the second alternative, i.e., that the morphological processing cost stems from the semantic-syntactic level.     

Reading development in agglutinative languages: Evidence from beginning,intermediate, and adult Basque readers

Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n = 32 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-a, -ari, -aren, and -arentzat, i.e., inflectional sequences). To test whether the process of word recognition was modulated by the knowledge of word structure in the language, half of the participants’ native language was Basque and the other half’s native language was Spanish. Children showed robust effects of frequency and length of inflection that diminished with age. In addition, the effect of length of inflection was modulated by the frequency of the stem and by the native language. Taken together, these results suggest that word recognition develops from a decoding strategy to a direct lexical access strategy and that this process is modulated by children’s knowledge of the inflectional structure of words from the beginning of their reading experience.     

Left hemisphere language lateralization in bilinguals and monolinguals

Tachistoscopic studies of lateralization in bilinguals suggest that there is a greater degree of right hemisphere involvement in their processing of language than is typically found in monolinguals. However, most of the studies reviewed failed to control the sex, handedness, and degree of fluency of the subjects and did not include a monolingual comparison group. The present study used adult right-handed males (Portuguese-English bilinguals and English-speaking monolinguals) in a tachistoscopic word-reading task. In Experiment 1, the words from the bilinguals’ two languages were presented in mixed blocks, while in Experiment 2, they were presented in separate blocks. The results were: (1) a similar level of left hemisphere advantage for language in the bilingual and the monolingual groups, (2) no evidence of greater heterogeneity of asymmetry patterns in bilinguals, and (3) a significant correlation (r=.61) for lateralization levels of the bilinguals’ two languages. These results indicate that language is processed primarily in the left hemisphere of both bilinguals and monolinguals.     

Bilinguals Show Weaker Lexical Access During Spoken Sentence Comprehension

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened for target words in spoken English sentences while their eye-movements were recorded. Bilinguals’ eye-movements reflected weaker lexical access relative to monolinguals; furthermore, the effect of semantic constraint differed across first versus second language processing. Specifically, English-native bilinguals showed fewer overall looks to target items, regardless of sentence constraint; German-native bilinguals activated target items more slowly and maintained target activation over a longer period of time in the low-constraint condition compared with monolinguals. No eye movements to cross-linguistic competitors were observed, suggesting that these lexical access disadvantages were present during bilingual spoken sentence comprehension even in the absence of overt interlingual competition.     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: evidence from masked phonological priming

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch-French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first-and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed.