Effects of morphosyntactic gender features in bilingual language processing

A central issue in bilingual research concerns the extent to which linguistic representations in the two languages are processed independently of each other. This paper reports the results of an empirical study and a model stimulation, which provide evidence for the interactive view, which holds that processing is not independent. Specifically, a reading experiment examined whether morpho-syntactic features associated with lexical representations in a bilinguals’ native language, in this case the masculine gender feature associated with the er ending of agentive nouns in German, are automatically activated by the processing of morphologically related representations in their second language, in this case English agentive nouns that end in er. Experimental findings suggest that the German-English bilinguals have a bias to interpret the referents of such nouns as male relative to English monolinguals. Subsequent computational simulation studies with an interactive activation network confirmed that this effect is due to the influence of the morphosyntactic er representation in the bilingual models that is absent in the monolingual models. The results provide evidence for an interactive view of bilingual memory and processing for language learners of age 8 and above.     

Influence of oral language and phonological awareness on children's bilingual reading

The purpose of this study was to assess the roles of oral language and phonological awareness on reading performance in grade 3 bilingual students. Several hierarchical models assessed the best predictors of third grade English and Spanish word attack, word identification and reading comprehension. Predictor variables were measures of phonological awareness, expressive vocabulary, receptive vocabulary, and syntax in both English and Spanish. The results showed that within language contributions of expressive vocabulary and syntax best predicted literacy when compared to phonological awareness measures.     

Spanish-English bilingual toddlers’ vocabulary skills: The role of caregiver language input and warmth

There is a well-documented link between bilingual language development and the relative amounts of exposure to each language. Less is known about the role of quality indicators of caregiver-child interactions in bilingual homes, including caregiver input diversity, warmth and sensitivity. This longitudinal study examines the relation between caregiver input (lexical diversity, amount), warmth and sensitivity and bilingual toddlers’ subsequent vocabulary outcomes. We video-recorded caregiver-child interactions in Spanish-English Latino homes when toddlers (n = 47) were 18 months of age (M = 18.32 months; SD = 1.02 months). At the 24-month follow-up, we measured children's vocabulary as total vocabulary (English, Spanish combined) as well as within language (Spanish, English). Results revealed that Spanish lexical diversity exposure at 18 months from caregivers was positively associated with children's Spanish and total vocabulary scores at 24 months, while English lexical diversity was positively associated with children's English scores; lexical diversity and amount were highly correlated. Additionally, caregivers’ warmth was positively associated with children's Spanish, English and total vocabulary scores. Together, these factors accounted for substantial variance (30–40%) in vocabulary outcomes. Notably, caregiver input accounted for more variance in single language outcomes than did caregiver warmth, whereas caregiver warmth uniquely accounted for more variance in total vocabulary scores. Our findings extend prior research findings by suggesting that children's dual language development may depend on their exposure to a diverse set of words, not only amount of language exposure, as well as warm interactions with caregivers. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://youtu.be/q1V_7fz5wog

Highlights

• Video-recorded observations of caregiver-child interactions revealed warmth and high sensitivity from Latino caregivers.
• Linguistically-detailed analyses of caregiver input revealed wide variation in the diversity of Spanish and English directed at 18-month-old bilingual toddlers.
• Bilingual toddlers’ vocabulary (single language, total) was positively associated with caregivers’ diverse input and warmth, thus extending prior findings on bilinguals’ amount of language exposure.
• Findings suggest that caregivers’ lexical diversity explains more variance in bilingual toddlers’ single language outcomes, whereas warmth explains more variance in total vocabulary scores.

     

第二语言学习与脑可塑性

脑可塑性指人脑会因为环境刺激、认知需求和行为经验而产生功能或结构改变。近10年来的单双语者对比和语言训练研究结果表明, 不论儿童、青年或老年人, 第二语言学习和使用都能改变其脑运行模式并带来相应结构变化, 包括灰质(GM)体积和白质(WM)密度增加, 且长期持续的双语经验还能形成认知优势, 帮助抵制由老化导致的负面认知影响。基于脑可塑性概念及其研究证据, 从双语经验与语言训练两方面, 对比分析了长期和短期第二语言学习引起脑功能或结构变化及其内在机制, 并对未来相关研究进行了展望。     

When your heart is in your mouth: the effect of second language use on negative emotions

Research on bilingualism and emotions has shown stronger emotional responses in the native language (L1) compared to a foreign language. We investigated the potential of purposeful second language (L2) use as a means of decreasing the experience of psychological distress. Native Swedish speakers read and answered questions about negative and neutral texts in their L1 (Swedish) and their L2 (English) and were asked to rate their level of distress before or after the questions. The texts and associated questions were either written in the same (within-language), or different languages (cross-language). We found that within-language trials when the text was written in participants’ native language (Swedish–Swedish) resulted in an increase of distress, whilst cross-language trials (Swedish–English) resulted in a decrease of distress. This implies that purposeful second language use can diminish levels of distress experienced following a negative event encoded in one's first language.     

Language-experience facilitates discrimination of /d-th/ in monolingual and bilingual acquisition of English

To trace how age and language experience shape the discrimination of native and non-native phonetic contrasts, we compared 4-year-olds learning either English or French or both and simultaneous bilingual adults on their ability to discriminate the English /d-th/ contrast. Findings show that the ability to discriminate the native English contrast improved with age. However, in the absence of experience with this contrast, discrimination of French children and adults remained unchanged during development. Furthermore, although simultaneous bilingual and monolingual English adults were comparable, children exposed to both English and French were poorer at discriminating this contrast when compared to monolingual English-learning 4-year-olds. Thus, language experience facilitates perception of the English /d-th/ contrast and this facilitation occurs later in development when English and French are acquired simultaneously. The difference between bilingual and monolingual acquisition has implications for language organization in children with simultaneous exposure.     

Effects of language experience on the perception of American Sign Language

Perception of American Sign Language (ASL) handshape and place of articulation parameters was investigated in three groups of signers: deaf native signers, deaf non-native signers who acquired ASL between the ages of 10 and 18, and hearing non-native signers who acquired ASL as a second language between the ages of 10 and 26. Participants were asked to identify and discriminate dynamic synthetic signs on forced choice identification and similarity judgement tasks. No differences were found in identification performance, but there were effects of language experience on discrimination of the handshape stimuli. Participants were significantly less likely to discriminate handshape stimuli drawn from the region of the category prototype than stimuli that were peripheral to the category or that straddled a category boundary. This pattern was significant for both groups of deaf signers, but was more pronounced for the native signers. The hearing L2 signers exhibited a similar pattern of discrimination, but results did not reach significance. An effect of category structure on the discrimination of place of articulation stimuli was also found, but it did not interact with language background. We conclude that early experience with a signed language magnifies the influence of category prototypes on the perceptual processing of handshape primes, leading to differences in the distribution of attentional resources between native and non-native signers during language comprehension.     

Assessing the double phonemic representation in bilingual speakers of Spanish and English: an electrophysiological study

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 10) to test pre-attentive speech discrimination in two language contexts. ERPs were recorded while participants silently read magazines in English or Spanish. Two speech contrast conditions were recorded in each language context. In the phonemic in English condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in English, but represented the same phonemic category in Spanish. In the phonemic in Spanish condition, the speech sounds represented two different phonemic categories in Spanish, but represented the same phonemic categories in English. Results showed pre-attentive discrimination when the acoustics/phonetics of the speech sounds match the language context (e.g., phonemic in English condition during the English language context). The results suggest that language contexts can affect pre-attentive auditory change detection. Specifically, bilinguals’ mental processing of stop consonants relies on contextual linguistic information.     

Discrimination of speech sounds by children with dyslexia: comparisons with chronological age and reading level controls

Previous studies have shown that children suffering from developmental dyslexia have a deficit in categorical perception of speech sounds. The aim of the current study was to better understand the nature of this categorical perception deficit. In this study, categorical perception skills of children with dyslexia were compared with those of chronological age and reading level controls. Children identified and discriminated /do-to/ syllables along a voice onset time (VOT) continuum. Results showed that children with dyslexia discriminated among phonemically contrastive pairs less accurately than did chronological age and reading level controls and also showed higher sensitivity in the discrimination of allophonic contrasts. These results suggest that children with dyslexia perceive speech with allophonic units rather than phonemic units. The origin of allophonic perception in the course of perceptual development and its implication for reading acquisition are discussed.     

Growth in working memory and inhibition predicts literacy in English language learners: A cross-sectional and longitudinal study

The purpose of this study was to determine whether cross-sectional and growth effects in second language (L2) literacy are related to the executive component of working memory (WM) and whether inhibition may underlie the links between WM and reading in children whose first language (L1) is Spanish. Elementary school children (grades 1, 2 and 3) were administered a battery of cognitive [WM, short-term memory (STM), random generation, rapid naming, phonological processing], vocabulary and reading measures in both Spanish (L1) and English (L2) in Year 1 and again one year later. The regression analyses showed that L2 growth in WM significantly predicted growth in L2 reading skills even when inhibition was controlled. Further, the contributions of WM to reading growth in both L1 and L2 reading were independent of cross-language skills in phonological processing, STM, oral language and naming speed. Overall, the results suggest the mental activities that underlie WM and inhibition in predictions of L2 literacy reflect independent executive processes.     

The metamorphosis of the statistical segmentation output: Lexicalization during artificial language learning

This study combined artificial language learning (ALL) with conventional experimental techniques to test whether statistical speech segmentation outputs are integrated into adult listeners’ mental lexicon. Lexicalization was assessed through inhibitory effects of novel neighbors (created by the parsing process) on auditory lexical decisions to real words. Both immediately after familiarization and post-one week, ALL outputs were lexicalized only when the cues available during familiarization (transitional probabilities and wordlikeness) suggested the same parsing (Experiments 1 and 3). No lexicalization effect occurred with incongruent cues (Experiments 2 and 4). Yet, ALL differed from chance, suggesting a dissociation between item knowledge and lexicalization. Similarly contrasted results were found when frequency of occurrence of the stimuli was equated during familiarization (Experiments 3 and 4). Our findings thus indicate that ALL outputs may be lexicalized as far as the segmentation cues are congruent, and that this process cannot be accounted for by raw frequency.     

The relationship between language production and verbal short-term memory: The role of stress grouping

This study investigates the influence of stress grouping on verbal short-term memory (STM). English speakers show a preference to combine syllables into trochaic groups, both lexically and in continuous speech. In two serial recall experiments, auditory lists of nonsense syllables were presented with either trochaic (STRONG–weak) or iambic (weak–STRONG) stress patterns, or in monotone. The acoustic correlates that carry stress were also manipulated in order to examine the relationship between input and output processes during recall. In Experiment 1, stressed and unstressed syllables differed in intensity and pitch but were matched for spoken duration. Significantly more syllables were recalled in the trochaic stress pattern condition than in the iambic and monotone conditions, which did not differ. In Experiment 2, spoken duration and pitch were manipulated but intensity was held constant. No effects of stress grouping were observed, suggesting that intensity is a critical acoustic factor for trochaic grouping. Acoustic analyses demonstrated that speech output was not identical to the auditory input, but that participants generated correct stress patterns by manipulating acoustic correlates in the same way in both experiments. These data challenge the idea of a language-independent STM store and support the notion of separable phonological input and output processes.     

Word recognition in child second language learners: Evidence from cognates and false friends

We studied how Dutch children learned English as a second language (L2) in the classroom. Learners at different levels of L2 proficiency recognized words under different task conditions. Beginning learners in primary school (fifth and sixth grades) and more advanced learners in secondary school (seventh and ninth grades) made lexical decisions on words that are similar for English and Dutch in both meaning and form (“cognates”) or only in form (“false friends”). Cognates were processed faster than matched control words by all participant groups in an English lexical decision task (Experiment 1) but not in a Dutch lexical decision task (Experiment 2). An English lexical decision task that mixed cognates and false friends (Experiment 3) led to consistently longer reaction times for both item types relative to controls. Thus, children in the early stages of learning an L2 already activate word candidates in both of their languages (language-nonselective access) and respond differently to cognates in the presence or absence of false friends in the stimulus list.     

Memory for non-native language: The role of lexical processing in the retention of surface form

Research on memory for native language (L1) has consistently shown that retention of surface form is inferior to that of gist (e.g., Sachs, 1967). This paper investigates whether the same pattern is found in memory for non-native language (L2). We apply a model of bilingual word processing to more complex linguistic structures and predict that memory for L2 sentences ought to contain more surface information than L1 sentences. Native and non-native speakers of English were tested on a set of sentence pairs with different surface forms but the same meaning (e.g., “The bullet hit/struck the bull's eye”). Memory for these sentences was assessed with a cued recall procedure. Responses showed that native and non-native speakers did not differ in the accuracy of gist-based recall but that non-native speakers outperformed native speakers in the retention of surface form. The results suggest that L2 processing involves more intensive encoding of lexical level information than L1 processing.     

Effects of past language experience and present language context on the shape bias in Spanish–English bilingual children

English‐monolingual children develop a shape bias early in language acquisition, such that they more often generalize a novel label based on shape than other features. Spanish‐monolingual children, however, do not show this bias to the same extent (Hahn & Cantrell, 2012). Studying children who are simultaneously learning both Spanish and English presents a unique opportunity to further investigate how this word‐learning bias develops. Thus, we asked how Spanish–English bilingual children (M_age = 21.31 months) perform in a novel‐noun generalization (NNG) task, specifically examining how past language experience (i.e. language exposure and vocabulary size) and present language context (i.e. whether the NNG task was conducted in Spanish or English) influence the strength of the shape bias. Participants completed the NNG task either entirely in English (N = 16) or entirely in Spanish (N = 16), as well as language understanding tasks in both English and Spanish to ensure that they understood what the experimenter was asking them to do. Parents completed a language exposure survey and vocabulary checklists in Spanish and English. There was a significant interaction between condition and choice type: Bilingual children in the English condition showed a shape bias in the NNG task, but bilingual children in the Spanish condition showed no reliable biases. No measures of past language experience were related to NNG task performance. These results suggest that when learning new words, bilingual children are attuned to the regularities of the present language context, and prior language experiences may play a more secondary role.     

Hemispheric asymmetries in processing L1 and L2 idioms: effects of salience and context

This study investigates the contribution of the left and right hemispheres to the comprehension of bilingual figurative language and the joint effects of salience and context on the differential cerebral involvement in idiom processing. The divided visual field and the lexical decision priming paradigms were employed to examine the activation of salient and nonsalient ambiguous idiom interpretations (i.e., literal vs. non-literal) in the two hemispheres. Literally plausible ambiguous idioms, L1 (Polish) and L2 (English), were embedded in unconstraining ambiguous (e.g., I knew he kept an ace up his sleeve) or constraining unambiguous context clearly favoring their conventional idiomatic interpretation (e.g., The debating president kept an ace up his sleeve). Idioms were presented centrally, followed by laterally presented targets related to the figurative (e.g., GAIN) or literal (e.g., SHIRT) meaning of the idiom and displayed at Interstimulus Intervals (ISIs) of 0 ms (Experiment 1), 300 ms (Experiment 2), and 800 ms (Experiment 3). Results indicate that context and salience effects are significantly modulated by the language (native vs. nonnative) of the stimulus materials being presented to each hemisphere. Literal facilitation was found for L2 idioms in all three ISI conditions, which supports the notion of the special status that literal meanings of L2 idioms enjoy in the course of their processing by nonnative language users. No significant differences were found between the right and left hemispheres in regards to their sensitivity to contextual constraints. Results are discussed in terms of the Graded Salience Hypothesis and the Fine/Coarse Coding Theory.     

Bridging ears and eyes when learning spoken words: On the effects of bilingual experience at 30 months

From the very first moments of their lives, infants selectively attend to the visible orofacial movements of their social partners and apply their exquisite speech perception skills to the service of lexical learning. Here we explore how early bilingual experience modulates children's ability to use visible speech as they form new lexical representations. Using a cross‐modal word‐learning task, bilingual children aged 30 months were tested on their ability to learn new lexical mappings in either the auditory or the visual modality. Lexical recognition was assessed either in the same modality as the one used at learning (‘same modality’ condition: auditory test after auditory learning, visual test after visual learning) or in the other modality (‘cross‐modality’ condition: visual test after auditory learning, auditory test after visual learning). The results revealed that like their monolingual peers, bilingual children successfully learn new words in either the auditory or the visual modality and show cross‐modal recognition of words following auditory learning. Interestingly, as opposed to monolinguals, they also demonstrate cross‐modal recognition of words upon visual learning. Collectively, these findings indicate a bilingual edge in visual word learning, expressed in the capacity to form a recoverable cross‐modal representation of visually learned words.     

The effect of bilingualism on lexical learning and memory across two language modalities: some evidence for a domain-specific,but not general,advantage

ABSTRACT

The present study was conducted to replicate bilingual advantages in short-term memory for language-like material and word learning in young adults and extend this research to the sign domain, ultimately with the goal of investigating the domain specificity of bilingual advantages in cognition. Data from 112 monolingual hearing non-signers and 78 bilingual hearing non-signers were analysed for this study. Participants completed a battery of tasks assessing sign and word learning, short-term memory, working memory capacity, intelligence, and a language and demographic questionnaire. Overall, the results of this study suggested a bilingual advantage in memory for speech-like material – no other advantage (or disadvantage) was found. Results are discussed within the context of recent large-scale experimental and meta-analytic studies that have failed to find bilingual advantages in domain-general abilities such as attention control and working memory capacity in young adults.