Of substance: The nature of language effects on entity construal

Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind [whisk; Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A cross-linguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169–200]. Five experiments replicated this language type effect on entity construal, extended it to quite different stimuli from those studied before, and extended it to a comparison between Mandarin speakers and English speakers. A sixth experiment, which did not involve interpreting the meaning of a noun or a pronoun that stands for a noun, failed to find any effect of language type on entity construal. Thus, the overall pattern of findings supports a non-Whorfian, language on language account, according to which sensitivity to lexical statistics in a count/mass language leads adults to assign a novel noun in neutral syntax the status of a count noun, influencing construal of ambiguous entities. The experiments also document and explore cross-linguistically universal factors that influence entity construal, and favor Prasada’s [Prasada, S. (1999). Names for things and stuff: An Aristotelian perspective. In R. Jackendoff, P. Bloom, & K. Wynn (Eds.), Language, logic, and concepts (pp. 119–146). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press] hypothesis that features indicating non-accidentalness of an entity’s form lead participants to a construal of object kind rather than substance kind. Finally, the experiments document the age at which the language type effect emerges in lexical projection. The details of the developmental pattern are consistent with the lexical statistics hypothesis, along with a universal increase in sensitivity to material kind.     

How children block learning from ignorant speakers

Preschool children typically do not learn words from ignorant or unreliable speakers. Here, we examined the mechanism by which these learning failures occur by modifying the comprehension test procedure that measures word learning. Following lexical training by a knowledgeable or ignorant speaker, 48 preschool-aged children were asked either a standard comprehension test question (i.e., “Which one is the blicket”) or a question about the labeling episode (i.e., “Which one did I say is the blicket”). Immediately after training, children chose the object labeled by an ignorant speaker when asked the episode question, but not when asked the semantic question. However, the advantage for episode questions disappeared when the same children were asked after a brief delay. These findings show that children encode their experiences with ignorant speakers, but do not form semantic representations on the basis of those experiences.     

Processing typology and why psychologists need to know about it

This paper illustrates an interdisciplinary research program based on cross-linguistic comparison that is of relevance for psychologists working on language processing, so-called “processing typology” [Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; (2004). Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press]. Its most original feature is the hypothesis that patterns and preferences found in performance in languages with several structures of a given type (e.g. preferences among alternative word orders) are the same patterns and preferences one finds across languages in the fixed conventions of grammars that permit less variation (i.e. in fixed word orders). Data supporting this “performance-grammar correspondence hypothesis” are summarized. One of its consequences is that principles of performance can be used to make predictions for patterns of grammatical variation, while preferences in grammars become relevant for the testing of psycholinguistic ideas. Two proposed principles of ordering in performance, in terms of “end weight” and “memory cost”, are criticized on the basis of cross-linguistic data. Both predict an asymmetry in ordering, whereby some category A precedes B. But end weight is not a valid cross-linguistic asymmetry, and memory cost cannot explain certain asymmetries for which it has been invoked when different language types are considered. The paper argues for greater mutual awareness between processing theorists and language typologists, for more consideration of non-European grammars and language types in psycholinguistics, and for a greater appeal to processing in the explanation of typological variation.     

Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this arbitrariness assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking monolinguals learned meanings for Japanese words in a vocabulary-learning task. Spoken Japanese words were paired with English meanings that: (1) matched the actual meaning of the Japanese word (e.g., “hayai” paired with fast); (2) were antonyms for the actual meaning (e.g., “hayai” paired with slow); or (3) were randomly selected from the set of antonyms (e.g., “hayai” paired with blunt). The results showed that participants learned the actual English equivalents and antonyms for Japanese words more accurately and responded faster than when learning randomly paired meanings. These findings suggest that natural languages contain non-arbitrary links between sound structure and meaning and further, that learners are sensitive to these non-arbitrary relationships within spoken language.     

Stress Judgment and Production in English Derivation,and Word Reading in Adult Mandarin-Speaking English Learners

For monolingual English-speaking children, judgment and production of stress in derived words, including words with phonologically neutral (e.g., -ness) and non-neutral suffixes (e.g., -ity), is important to both academic vocabulary growth and to word reading. For Mandarin-speaking adult English learners (AELs) the challenge of learning the English stress system might be complicated by cross-linguistic differences in prosodic function and features. As Mandarin-speakers become more proficient in English, patterns similar to those seen in monolingual children could emerge in which awareness and use of stress and suffix cues benefit word reading. A correlational design was used to examine the contributions of English stress in derivation with neutral and non-neutral suffixes to English word and nonword reading. Stress judgment in non-neutral derivation predicted word reading after controlling for working memory and English vocabulary; whereas stress production in neutral derivation contributed to word reading and pseudoword decoding, independent of working memory and English vocabulary. Although AELs could use stress and suffix cues for word reading, AELs were different from native English speakers in awareness of non-neutral suffix cues conditioning lexical stress placement. AELs may need to rely on lexical storage of primary stress in derivations with non-neutral suffixes.     

The frequency effect in second-language visual word recognition

A lexical decision experiment with Dutch-English bilinguals compared the effect of word frequency on visual word recognition in the first language with that in the second language. Bilinguals showed a considerably larger frequency effect in their second language, even though corpus frequency was matched across languages. Experiment 2 tested monolingual, native speakers of English on the English materials from Experiment 1. This yielded a frequency effect comparable to that of the bilinguals in Dutch (their L1). These results constrain the way in which existing models of word recognition can be extended to unbalanced bilingualism. In particular, the results are compatible with a theory by which the frequency effect originates from implicit learning. They are also compatible with models that attribute frequency effects to serial search in frequency-ordered bins (Murray & Forster, 2004), if these models are extended with the assumption that scanning speed is language dependent, or that bins are not language specific.     

The cognitive processing of Japanese loanwords in katakana

Abstract: The present study examined two questions concerning the cognitive processing of Japanese loanwords borrowed from English and written in katakana. The first question was whether "interlexical activation" occurs between Japanese and English. Results from a lexical decision task showed that loanwords phonetically similar to the original English words were judged with the same speed and accuracy as those being phonetically dissimilar to their original English words. The study further examined the cognitive processing of unadopted loanwords (i.e., words unlisted in a Japanese loanword dictionary). Reaction times displayed the shortest mean for non-words, followed by pseudo-loanwords, and finally unadopted loanwords. Thus, the only time the lexical representation of an original English word was possibly activated was when native Japanese speakers had seldom seen the word in katakana. The second question was what creates the "lexical mental boundary" between adopted and unadopted loanwords. A questionnaire showed that native Japanese speakers are likely to use decision-making strategies for determining lexicality of loanwords in Japanese based on their daily experience of exposure to katakana words in print.     

Cross-script phonological priming with Japanese Kanji primes and English targets

Two experiments investigated whether Japanese–English bilinguals have integrated phonological stores for their two languages using a masked phonological priming task with Japanese Kanji (logographic) primes and English targets. In both experiments, lexical decisions for English target words were facilitated by phonologically similar Kanji primes. Furthermore, the size of the phonological priming effect was uninfluenced by the participants' English proficiency or target word frequency, which suggests that the priming effect arose from feedback from sublexical phonological representations to lexical orthographic representations. Because of the orthographic and phonological differences between Japanese and English, these findings provide particularly strong support for the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model's assumption that representations are integrated across languages.     

A disadvantage in bilingual sentence production modulated by syntactic frequency and similarity across languages

Bilingual speakers access individual words less fluently, quickly, and accurately than monolinguals, particularly when accessing low-frequency words. Here we examined whether the bilingual speech production disadvantage would (a) extend to full sentences above and beyond single word retrieval and whether it would be modulated by (b) structural frequency and (c) syntactic properties of the bilingual speakers’ other language. English monolinguals, Spanish–English bilinguals and Mandarin–English bilinguals were tested in a sentence production task conducted exclusively in English. Response times were modulated by bilingualism, structural frequency, and structural similarity across the bilingual speakers’ two languages. These results refine our knowledge regarding the scope of the bilingual disadvantage, demonstrate that frequency effects apply to syntactic structures, and also suggest that syntax is partially shared across bilinguals’ two languages.     

Recognition of Inflected Words in a Morphologically Limited Language: Frequency Effects in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish–Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with low-frequency inflected nouns, while with medium- and high-frequency inflections, full-form processing was apparently employed. The bilinguals demonstrated a similar pattern. The results suggest that morpheme-based recognition is employed even in a morphologically limited language when the inflectional forms occur rarely. With more frequent inflectional forms, full-form representations have developed for both mono- and bilingual speakers. In a comparable study employing a morphologically rich language, Finnish, Lehtonen and Laine (2003, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 213–225) observed full-form access only at the high-frequency range and only for monolinguals. These differences suggest that besides word frequency and language background, the morphological richness of a language affects the processing mode employed with polymorphemic wordsThis study was financially supported by a grant (#20010) from the Joint Committee of the Nordic Social Science Research Councils (NOS-S). We are grateful for Jonna Kortelahti- Brunnsteiner for recruitment and testing of part of the bilingual participants     

Quantity judgments and individuation: evidence that mass nouns count

Three experiments explored the semantics of the mass-count distinction in young children and adults. In Experiments 1 and 2, the quantity judgments of participants provided evidence that some mass nouns refer to individuals, as such. Participants judged one large portion of stuff to be "more" than three tiny portions for substance-mass nouns (e.g. mustard, ketchup), but chose according to number for count nouns (e.g. shoes, candles) and object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture, jewelry). These results suggest that some mass nouns quantify over individuals, and that therefore reference to individuals does not distinguish count nouns from mass nouns. Thus, Experiments 1 and 2 failed to support the hypothesis that there exist one-to-one mappings between mass-count syntax and semantics for either adults or young children. In Experiment 3, it was found that for mass-count flexible terms (e.g. string, stone) participants based quantity judgments on number when the terms were used with count syntax, but on total amount of stuff when used with mass syntax. Apparently, the presence of discrete physical objects in a scene (e.g. stones) is not sufficient to permit quantity judgments based on number. It is proposed that object-mass nouns (e.g. furniture) can be used to refer to individuals due to lexically specified grammatical features that normally occur in count syntax. Also, we suggest that children learning language parse words that refer to individuals as count nouns unless given morpho-syntactic and referential evidence to the contrary, in which case object-mass nouns are acquired.     

Events and the ontology of individuals: verbs as a source of individuating mass and count nouns

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., cats) while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., water). We evaluated this claim using the quantity judgment method, and tested the interpretation of words used in mass and count syntax that described either protracted, "durative" events (e.g., mass: some dancing; count: a dance), or instantaneous, "punctual" events (e.g., mass: some jumping; count: a jump). For durative words, participants judged, for example, that six brief dances are more dances but less dancing than two long dances, thus showing a significant difference in their interpretation of the count and mass usages. However, for punctual words, participants judged, for example, that six small jumps are both more jumps and more jumping than two long jumps, resulting in no difference due to mass-count syntax. Further, when asked which dimensions are important for comparing quantities of durative and punctual events, participants ranked number as first in importance for durative and punctual words presented in count syntax, but also for punctual words presented in mass syntax. These results indicate that names for punctual events individuate when used in either mass or count syntax, and thus provide evidence against the idea that mass syntax forces an unindividuated construal. They also indicate that event punctuality as encoded by verbs is importantly linked to the individuation of NPs, and may access a common underlying ontology of individuals.     

The KEY to the ROCK: Near-homophony in nonnative visual word recognition

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone was defined as a phonological neighbor involving a contrast absent in the speaker’s L1 (e.g., ROCK-LOCK for native speakers of Japanese). In all participant groups, homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls. In the Japanese and Arabic groups, near-homophones also induced relatively more false positives and slower processing. The results show that, even when auditory perception is not involved, recognition of nonnative words and, by implication, their lexical representations are affected by the L1 phonology.     

Brain bases of English morphological processing: A comparison between Chinese-English,Spanish-English bilingual,and English monolingual children

How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English speakers of Chinese or Spanish, and English monolinguals, all raised in the US (N = 152, ages 5–10). Children completed an English morphological word processing task during fNIRS neuroimaging. The findings revealed both language-specific and shared bilingual effects. The language-specific effects were that Chinese and Spanish bilinguals showed principled differences in their neural organization for English lexical morphology. The common bilingual effects shared by the two groups were that in both bilingual groups, increased home language proficiency was associated with stronger left superior temporal gyrus (STG) activation when processing the English word structures that are most dissimilar from the home language. The findings inform theories of language and brain development during the key periods of neural reorganization for learning to read by illuminating experience-based plasticity in linguistically diverse learners.     

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.     

Using morphology when spelling in a shallow orthographic system: The case of Spanish

Deep orthographies usually represent morphology and phonology simultaneously; both resources are necessary for spelling. In shallow orthographies, such as Spanish, phonology would be enough to spell most words. However, morphological knowledge may also take part in spelling. This study examined how Spanish children in 1st (N = 148), 2nd (N = 155) and 3rd grade (N = 155) use morphological information to spell plural nouns and verbs. A word dictation task was designed. The task included high and low frequency plural nouns ending in “s” (morphological “-s” condition) and verbs in the 2nd person ending in “s” (morphological “-s” condition). A lexical condition including words with a final “s” which was not morphologically motivated was used as a control condition (lexical “-s” condition). The results show that, although Spanish spelling is influenced by phonology, morphological information is also used. These results are discussed in relation to current models of word spelling.     

Sentence interpretation in normal and aphasic Hindi speakers.

In interpreting a sentence, listeners rely on a variety of linguistic cues to assign grammatical roles such as agent and patient. The present study considered the relative ranking of three cues to agenthood (word order, noun animacy, and subject-verb agreement) in normal and aphasic speakers of Hindi. Because animacy plays a grammatical role in Hindi (determining the nature and acceptability of sentences without accusative marking), this language is relevant to the claim that Broca's aphasia involves a dissociation between grammar and semantics. Results of Study 1 with normal Hindi-dominant speakers showed that animacy is the strongest cue in this language, while agreement is the weakest cue. In Study 2, Hindi-English bilinguals were tested in both their languages. Most showed the normal animacy-dominant monolingual pattern in Hindi, with a mixture of strategies from both languages in their interpretation of English. A substantial minority showed mixed strategies in both languages. Only 5 of 48 subjects displayed a complete separation between languages, with animacy dominance in Hindi and word order dominance in English. In Study 3, two Hindi-English bilinguals with Broca's aphasia were tested in both languages. Results indicate (a) greater use of animacy in Hindi than in English and (b) greater use of word order in English than in Hindi. The strategies displayed by these patients fall well within the range observed among bilingual normals. We conclude that the use of animacy in sentence interpretation by these aphasic patients reflects preservation of normal, language-specific processing strategies; it cannot be interpreted as a nonlinguistic strategy developed to compensate for receptive agrammatism. Results are discussed in light of other cross-linguistic evidence on sentence comprehension in monolingual and bilingual aphasics.     

Implicit Association Test (IAT) Studies Investigating Pitch-Shape Audiovisual Cross-modal Associations Across Language Groups

Previous studies have shown that Chinese speakers and non-Chinese speakers exhibit different patterns of cross-modal congruence for the lexical tones of Mandarin Chinese, depending on which features of the pitch they attend to. But is this pattern of language-specific listening a conscious cultural strategy or an automatic processing effect? If automatic, does it also apply when the same pitch contours no longer sound like speech? Implicit Association Tests (IATs) provide an indirect measure of cross-modal association. In a series of IAT studies, conducted with participants with three kinds of language backgrounds (Chinese-dominant bilinguals, Chinese balanced bilinguals, and English speakers with no Chinese experience) we find language-specific congruence effects for Mandarin lexical tones but not for matched sine-wave stimuli. That is, for linguistic stimuli, non-Chinese speakers show advantages for pitch-height congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy); no congruence effects were found for Chinese speakers. For non-linguistic stimuli, all participant groups showed advantages for pitch-height congruence. The present findings suggest that non-lexical tone congruence (high-pointy, low-curvy) is a basic congruence pattern, and the acquisition of a language with lexical tone can alter this perception.