A bilingual advantage in visual language discrimination in infancy

The origins of the bilingual advantage in various cognitive tasks are largely unknown. We tested the hypothesis that bilinguals' early capacities to track their native languages separately and learn about the properties of each may be at the origin of such differences. Spanish-Catalan bilingual and Spanish or Catalan monolingual infants watched silent video recordings of French-English bilingual speakers and were tested on their ability to discern when the language changed from French to English or vice versa. The infants' performance was compared with that of previously tested French-English bilingual and English monolingual infants. Although all groups of monolingual infants failed to detect the change between English and French, both groups of bilingual infants succeeded. These findings reveal that bilingual experience can modulate the attentional system even without explicit training or feedback. They provide a basis for explaining the ontogeny of the general cognitive advantages of bilinguals.     

The bilingual brain: bilingual aphasia.

Since most people in the world know more than one language, bilingual aphasia is an important line of research in clinical and theoretical neurolinguistics. From a clinical and ethical viewpoint, it is no longer acceptable that bilingual aphasics be assessed in only one of the languages they know. Bilingual aphasic patients should receive comparable language tests in all their languages. In the present work, language recovery of 20 bilingual Friulian-Italian aphasics was investigated. Thirteen patients (65%) showed a similar impairment in both languages (parallel recovery), four patients (20%) showed a greater impairment of L2, while three patients (15%) showed a greater impairment of L1. Despite the many hypotheses advanced to account for nonparallel recovery, none of them seems to provide satisfactory explanations. The study of bilingual aphasics with parallel impairment of both languages allows us to verify the hypothesis whereby grammatical disorders in aphasia depend on the specific structure of each language. As far as rehabilitation programs for multilingual aphasics are concerned, several questions have been raised, many of which still need a satisfactory answer.     

Grammatical category-specific deficits in bilingual aphasia

We report the naming performance of an early and highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilingual (JPG) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). JPG's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with worse performance in naming verbs than nouns. This dissociation was present in oral and written naming and in his two languages, and it seems to stem from damage to, at least, the lexical level. Despite the fact that JPG's performance was qualitatively very similar across languages, his second language seemed to be more affected than his first language. These results indicate that the cortical organization of the two languages of highly proficient bilinguals follow similar organizational principles, one of this principles being grammatical class.     

Selective Deficit of One Language in a Bilingual Patient Following Surgery in the Left Perisylvian Area

We report on a right-handed bilingual patient with a left perisylvian arteriovenous malformation that caused a mild naming deficit evident only on formal language testing in both languages. Sodium amytal injected in the left carotid artery (Wada test) before surgery resulted in speech arrest for both languages. Following surgery for removal of the lesion she developed additional deficits in her native language without alteration in her second language. Selective impairment in one language after surgery demonstrates that each language has different anatomical representation within the perisylvian dominant area.     

Bilingual Performance on the Boston Naming Test: Preliminary Norms in Spanish and English

A total of 100 young educated bilingual adults were administered the Boston Naming Test (BNT) (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983) in both Spanish and English. Three group performance scores were obtained: English only, Spanish only, and a composite score indicating the total number of items correctly named independent of language. The scores for the entire group were significantly greater in English than in Spanish. An additional set of analyses explored individual differences in picture naming performance across the two languages as measured by the BNT. For a subset of the larger group (n= 25) there were significant differences in composite over single language scoring, but no significant differences between Spanish and English. Item analyses of correct responses were conducted in both languages to explore the construct validity of the standardized administration of the BNT with this population. There was much greater variability in responses over the Spanish items for this bilingual group. The results of a correlation analysis of information obtained from the initial questionnaire with the BNT scores in each language is also reported. The practical implications of this preliminary bilingual BNT normative data are discussed.     

Vowel categorization during word recognition in bilingual toddlers

Toddlers’ and preschoolers’ knowledge of the phonological forms of words was tested in Spanish-learning, Catalan-learning, and bilingual children. These populations are of particular interest because of differences in the Spanish and Catalan vowel systems: Catalan has two vowels in a phonetic region where Spanish has only one. The proximity of the Spanish vowel to the Catalan ones might pose special learning problems. Children were shown picture pairs; the target picture’s name was spoken correctly, or a vowel in the target word was altered. Altered vowels either contrasted with the usual vowel in Spanish and Catalan, or only in Catalan. Children’s looking to the target picture was used as a measure of word recognition. Monolinguals’ word recognition was hindered by within-language, but not non-native, vowel changes. Surprisingly, bilingual toddlers did not show sensitivity to changes in vowels contrastive only in Catalan. Among preschoolers, Catalan-dominant bilinguals but not Spanish-dominant bilinguals revealed mispronunciation sensitivity for the Catalan-only contrast. These studies reveal monolingual children’s robust knowledge of native-language vowel categories in words, and show that bilingual children whose two languages contain phonetically overlapping vowel categories may not treat those categories as separate in language comprehension.     

Minority Language Education in Unbalanced Bilingual Situations: A Case for the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis

This paper is placed in the linguistic and sociocultural context of Eastern Aragon, a region of Spain where two contact languages (Spanish and Catalan) coexist in an unbalanced situation favoring Spanish. The research was prompted by the regulation for the teaching of Catalan in that area, by means of the Cooperation Agreement signed by the Spanish Educational Ministry (MEC) and the local autonomous Cultural and Educational Department of the Diputación General de Aragon in November 1986. A comparative analysis is made between Eastern Aragon students' linguistic competence in Catalan and Spanish; a further comparison is established between these students and others living in bilingual Catalonia and in monolingual Aragon. We conclude by pointing out that the Linguistic Interdependence Hypothesis accounts for the results obtained in the study.     

Breaking Down the Bilingual Cost in Speech Production

Bilinguals have been shown to perform worse than monolinguals in a variety of verbal tasks. This study investigated this bilingual verbal cost in a large‐scale picture‐naming study conducted in Spanish. We explored how individual characteristics of the participants and the linguistic properties of the words being spoken influence this performance cost. In particular, we focused on the contributions of lexical frequency and phonological similarity across translations. The naming performance of Spanish‐Catalan bilinguals speaking in their dominant and non‐dominant language was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals. Single trial naming latencies were analyzed by means of linear mixed models accounting for individual effects at the participant and item level. While decreasing lexical frequency was shown to increase naming latencies in all groups, this variable by itself did not account for the bilingual cost. In turn, our results showed that the bilingual cost disappeared when naming words with high phonological similarity across translations. In short, our results show that frequency of use can play a role in the emergence of the bilingual cost, but that phonological similarity across translations should be regarded as one of the most important variables that determine the bilingual cost in speech production. Low phonological similarity across translations yields worse performance in bilinguals and promotes the bilingual cost in naming performance. The implications of our results for the effect of phonological similarity across translations within the bilingual speech production system are discussed.     

The selective impairment of phonological processing in speech production

We report the naming performance of a patient (DM) with a fluent progressive aphasia who made phonological errors in all language production tasks. The pattern of errors in naming was strikingly clear: DM made very many phonological errors that resulted almost always in nonword responses. The complete absence of semantic errors and the very low ratio of formal errors relative to nonword errors (1.6:30.3) in DM's performance are discussed in the context of recent claims about the nature of naming deficits in fluent aphasics. We argue that DM's performance makes highly improbable the claim that fluent aphasia results from global lesions affecting all levels of the lexical access system equally.     

双语经验降低言语产生过程中通达能力的研究综述

言语产生是指个体通过口头言语表达想法、感受,而通达过程是言语产生的关键过程。本文以言语产生的不同语言水平为线索,综合分析双语经验对言语产生过程中通达能力的影响,结果发现双语经验降低了言语产生中的通达效率。在此基础上,从跨语言干扰、语言使用频率和词汇量三个角度归纳双语通达劣势的原因。未来的研究应该考察双语经验对言语加工中不同方面的影响,并且对相关解释进行整合。     

The noun-verb problem in Chinese aphasia.

Previous studies have shown that Broca's aphasics experience a selective difficulty with action naming inside or outside of a sentence context. Conversely, it has been suggested that Wernicke's aphasics are particularly impaired in object naming. A number of explanations have been offered to account for this double dissociation, including grammatical accounts according to which the main verb problem in agrammatic Broca's aphasics is viewed as a by-product of their syntactic and/or morphological impairment, due perhaps to the greater morphological load carried by verbs (compared with nouns). In the Chinese language, there are no verb conjugations and no declensions. Hence there is no reason to expect a relationship between morphological impairment and deficits in action naming. We examined comprehension and production of object and action names, outside of a sentence context, in a sample of Chinese-speaking Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics. There was an interaction between patient group and object/action naming, but no corresponding interaction on the comprehension task. We conclude that action-naming deficits in Broca's aphasia (and/or the corresponding sparing of action names in Wernicke's aphasia) cannot be attributed to morphological differences between nouns and verbs. We also found a sublexical variant of the noun/verb dissociation applied to the internal structure of compound words made up of a verbal and a nominal element: Broca's aphasics tended to lexicalize the verbal portion of these words more often than the nominal compound, while Wernicke's showed the opposite pattern. These sublexical effects are difficult to explain in syntactic terms nor do they fit the standard lexical view. A modified lexical account is proposed, emphasizing semantic/conceptual effects in a distributed lexicon.     

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10–15 sentences, as if their perceptual system was “adapting” to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that, for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, exposure to compressed sentences in either language improves performance on sentences in the other language. Experiment 2 reports that Catalan/Spanish transfer of performance occurs even in monolingual speakers of Spanish who do not understand Catalan. In Experiment 3, we study another pair of languages— namely, English and French—and report no transfer of adaptation between these two languages for English—French bilinguals. Experiment 4, with monolingual English speakers, assesses transfer of adaptation from French, Dutch, and English toward English. Here we find that there is no adaptation from French and intermediate adaptation from Dutch. We discuss the locus of the adaptation to compressed speech and relate our findings to other cross-linguistic studies in speech perception.     

Sensitivity to Phonological Similarity Within and Across Languages

The influence of phonological similarity on bilingual language processing was examined within and across languages in three experiments. Phonological similarity was manipulated within a language by varying neighborhood density, and across languages by varying extent of cross-linguistic overlap between native and non-native languages. In Experiment 1, speed and accuracy of bilinguals’ picture naming were susceptible to phonological neighborhood density in both the first and the second language. In Experiment 2, eye-movement patterns indicated that the time-course of language activation varied across phonological neighborhood densities and across native/non-native language status. In Experiment 3, speed and accuracy of bilingual performance in an auditory lexical decision task were influenced by degree of cross-linguistic phonological overlap. Together, the three experiments confirm that bilinguals are sensitive to phonological similarity within and across languages and suggest that this sensitivity is asymmetrical across native and non-native languages and varies along the timecourse of word processing.     

Translation norms for English and Spanish: The role of lexical variables,word class,and L2 proficiency in negotiating translation ambiguity

We present a set of translation norms for 670 English and 760 Spanish nouns, verbs and class ambiguous items that varied in their lexical properties in both languages, collected from 80 bilingual participants. Half of the words in each language received more than a single translation across participants. Cue word frequency and imageability were both negatively correlated with number of translations. Word class predicted number of translations: Nouns had fewer translations than did verbs, which had fewer translations than class-ambiguous items. The translation probability of specific responses was positively correlated with target word frequency and imageability, and with its form overlap with the cue word. Translation choice was modulated by L2 proficiency: Less proficient bilinguals tended to produce lower probability translations than more proficient bilinguals, but only in forward translation, from Ll to L2. These findings highlight the importance of translation ambiguity as a factor influencing bilingual representation and performance. The norms can also provide an important resource to assist researchers in the selection of experimental materials for studies of bilingual and monolingual language performance. These norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Discriminating languages by speech-reading

The goal of this study was to explore the ability to discriminate languages using the visual correlates of speech (i.e., speech-reading). Participants were presented with silent video clips of an actor pronouncing two sentences (in Catalan and/or Spanish) and were asked to judge whether the sentences were in the same language or in different languages. Our results established that Spanish-Catalan bilingual speakers could discriminate running speech from their two languages on the basis of visual cues alone (Experiment 1). However, we found that this ability was critically restricted by linguistic experience, since Italian and English speakers who were unfamiliar with the test languages could not successfully discriminate the stimuli (Experiment 2). A test of Spanish monolingual speakers revealed that knowledge of only one of the two test languages was sufficient to achieve the discrimination, although at a lower level of accuracy than that seen in bilingual speakers (Experiment 3). Finally, we evaluated the ability to identify the language by speech-reading particularly distinctive words (Experiment 4). The results obtained are in accord with recent proposals arguing that the visual speech signal is rich in informational content, above and beyond what traditional accounts based solely on visemic confusion matrices would predict.     

On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production

There is a growing body of evidence showing that a word's cognate status is an important dimension affecting the naming performance of bilingual speakers. In a recent article, Kohnert extended this observation to the naming performance of an aphasic bilingual (DJ). DJ named pictures with cognate names more accurately than pictures with non-cognate names. Furthermore, having named the pictures in Spanish helped the subsequent retrieval (with a delay of one week between the two tests) of the same pictures' names in English, but only for pictures with cognate names. That is, there was a language transfer but only for those translation words that were phonologically similar. In this article we first evaluate the conclusions drawn from these results by Kohnert, and second we discuss the theoretical implications of the facilitatory effects of cognate words for models of speech production in bilingual speakers.     

Examining and reexamining the structure of Chinese-English bilingual memory

The asymmetry model of bilingual memory proposed by Kroll and Stewart assumes that translation from a first language (L1) into a second language (L2), or forward translation, is mediated by an underlying conceptual memory, whereas L2-to-L1, or backward, translation is lexical and direct. Lexical links from L2 to L1 are hypothesized to be stronger than those from L1 to L2, but conceptual links are stronger for L1 than L2. These assumptions were evaluated in this study, which used stimulus items with similar recognition thresholds. Proficient Chinese-English bilinguals were tested on picture naming, word naming, word translation and category matching. The translation asymmetry effect predicted by the model (i.e., backward being faster than forward translation) was demonstrated; matching an L1 item to a category name was also faster than matching an L2 item. This pattern of results, nevertheless, did not completely hold after an adjustment procedure which sought to control for variations in response production and concept retrieval times due to stimulus types. The present findings are consistent with previous ones which show increased L2 conceptual processing for the proficient bilingual. They also suggest that an extended version of the asymmetry model should take into account possible biasing effects associated with some conventionally used bilingual tasks.