Modality-specific effects in bilingual language perception

ABSTRACT

Language switching typically leads to language switch costs. Previous studies demonstrated that production-based language switching often results in reduced costs when the languages are assigned to distinct modalities (i.e. bimodal language switching) compared to switching within a modality (i.e. unimodal switching). In Experiment 1–3, we compared unimodal to bimodal switching in language perception. In Experiment 4, unimodal switching was compared to bivocal switching (i.e. languages were assigned to different voices). Experiment 1–3 revealed significantly higher switch costs for bimodal than for unimodal switching, indicating fundamental differences to language production studies. While bimodal switching leads to no (additional) costs but – under specific conditions – even to advantage in production, it increases switch costs in language perception. Moreover, Experiment 4 indicates that this is more a modality-specific rather than a general perception-based effect. Different voices instead of different modalities evoked no similar increase in switch costs.     

The bimodal bilingual brain: effects of sign language experience

Bimodal bilinguals are hearing individuals who know both a signed and a spoken language. Effects of bimodal bilingualism on behavior and brain organization are reviewed, and an fMRI investigation of the recognition of facial expressions by ASL-English bilinguals is reported. The fMRI results reveal separate effects of sign language and spoken language experience on activation patterns within the superior temporal sulcus. In addition, the strong left-lateralized activation for facial expression recognition previously observed for deaf signers was not observed for hearing signers. We conclude that both sign language experience and deafness can affect the neural organization for recognizing facial expressions, and we argue that bimodal bilinguals provide a unique window into the neurocognitive changes that occur with the acquisition of two languages.     

The bilingual brain: cerebral representation of languages.

The present article deals with theoretical and experimental aspects of language representation in the multilingual brain. Two general approaches were adopted in the study of the bilingual brain. The study of bilingual aphasics allows us to describe dissociations and double dissociations between the different subcomponents of the various languages. Furthermore, symptoms peculiar to bilingual aphasia were reported (pathological mixing and switching and translations disorders) which allowed the correlation of some abilities specific to bilinguals with particular neurofunctional systems. Another approach to the study of the bilingual brain is of the experimental type, such as electrophysiological investigations (electrocorticostimulation during brain surgery and event-related potentials) and functional neuroanatomy studies (positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging). Functional neuroanatomy studies investigated the brain representation of languages when processing lexical and syntactic stimuli and short stories. Neurophysiologic and neuroimaging studies evidenced a similar cerebral representation of L1 and L2 lexicons both in early and late bilinguals. The representation of grammatical aspects of languages seems to be different between the two languages if L2 is acquired after the age of 7, with automatic processes and correctness being lower than those of the native language. These results are in line with a greater representation of the two lexicons in the declarative memory systems, whereas morphosyntactic aspects may be organized in different systems according to the acquisition vs learning modality.     

Parental language mixing in bilingual families

An important question about early bilingualism that concerns both parents and researchers is the degree to which one language may interfere with another. This question rests on an implicit assumption that learning more than one language must always produce confusion and/or interference between (or among) the languages. Although many naturalistic studies have addressed this issue, no firm answers are yet available from the conflicting results obtained. Several factors appear to be responsible for the contradictory evidence, including the small numbers of subjects in each study, the large number of different language combinations of varying similarity that have been examined, and the variety of linguistic input situations (e.g., sequential bilingualism, language separation between home and school, parent/language separation), that have been observed. There is a consensus that children's language mixing can be eliminated if parents adhere strictly to the principle of one parent/one language enunciated by Grammont (Ronjat, 1913). However, this claim has not been directly examined. The primary goal of the present study is to characterize the linguistic input available to a child growing up with two languages. Analyses of the data show that a large proportion of parents, even those firmly committed to maintaining a strict separation of language by parent, model linguistically mixed utterances for their children. This finding suggests that children's early language mixing does not reflect interlinguistic confusion. Rather, it suggests that the child is formulating hypotheses about language based on the data available, i.e., that using the language of both father and mother in a single utterance is acceptable.     

Co-activation of syntax in bilingual language production

We report four experiments that examined whether bilinguals’ production of one language is affected by the syntactic properties of their other language. Greek–English and English–Greek highly proficient fluent bilinguals produced sentence completions following subject nouns whose translation had either the same or different number. We manipulated whether participants produced completions in the same language as the subject (the source language; one-language production) or the other language (the non-source language; two-language production), and whether they used only one language or both languages within the experimental session. The results demonstrated that the grammar systems of both languages were activated during both one-language and two-language production. The effects of the non-source language were particularly enhanced in two-language utterances, when both languages were used in the experiment, and when it was the bilinguals’ native language. We interpret our results in terms of a model of bilingual sentence production.     

Relationship between language competence and emotional competence in middle childhood

Research on children's emotional competence has received considerable attention in the last decade, including the role of language. Language competence (LC) and emotional competence (EC) comprise multiple components. These components and their specific interrelations have not been studied sufficiently. In our study, we examined relations between multiple components of LC and EC in a sample of 210 school-age children. Five measures represented LC: receptive vocabulary, verbal fluency, literacy, narrative structure, and the narrative use of evaluative devices. Four measures represented EC: expressive emotion vocabulary, declarative emotion knowledge, awareness of mixed emotions, and facial emotion recognition. Results showed strong positive correlations between LC and EC ranging between r = .12 and r = .45. In particular, receptive vocabulary and literacy were closely related to emotion knowledge and awareness of mixed emotions. A confirmatory factor analysis revealed that there is a common general ability factor for LC and EC. We discuss why receptive vocabulary and literacy might be so strongly related to emotion knowledge in school-age children. Our findings have implications for developmental psychologists, educational research, and speech-language pathologists.     

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.     

How bilingual experience and executive control influence development in language control among bilingual children

This longitudinal study investigates whether the development in executive control and bilingual experience predicts change in language control in bilingual children. Children were tested twice over the course of 1 year, using the language‐switching paradigm and the Simon task. The participants were Japanese‐English bilingual “returnee” children (ages 7–13), who returned to their first language (L1) environment after spending some years in a second language (L2) dominant environment. Testing these children upon their return to the L1 environment allowed us to disentangle the effect of age from bilingual experience, as they experienced an increase in age but a decrease in L2 exposure over time. Children who had less L2 exposure showed smaller improvement in baseline performance when naming pictures in English (i.e., when English was relevant across all trials). Moreover, development in trials where children had to switch between languages were modulated by development in executive control. That is, children who increased their performance in the English mixed repetition trials also performed better on the executive control task over time. Thus, development in executive control modulated change in language control among bilingual children, suggesting a positive relationship between language control and executive control in children's development.     

Time course of inhibitory processes in bilingual language processing

This study examines the time course of inhibitory processes in Spanish–English bilinguals, using the procedure described in Macizo, Bajo, and Martín. Bilingual participants were required to decide whether pairs of English words were related. Critical word pairs contained a word that shared the same orthography across languages but differed in meaning (interlingual homographs such as pie, meaning foot in Spanish). In Expts 1 and 2, participants were slower to respond to homographs presented along with words related to the Spanish meaning of the homograph as compared to control words. This result agrees with the view that bilinguals non‐selectively activate their two languages irrespective of the language they are using. In addition, bilinguals also slowed their responses when the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning was presented 500 ms after responding to homographs (Expt 1). This result suggests that bilinguals inhibited the irrelevant homograph meaning. However, the inhibitory effect was not observed in Expt 2 when the between‐trial interval was fixed to 750 ms which suggests that inhibition decayed over time.     

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 lexicon: Modality effects in processing

In this article the effects of modality on the processing in the bilingual lexicon will be explored. Therefore, two parallel repetition priming experiments were conducted, an auditory and a visual one. The subjects were Dutch-English bilinguals. They had to perform a lexical decision task. There were two types of stimuli: cognates and noncognates. The results indicated that there are no processing differences between the auditory and the visual modalities. Furthermore, in both experiments interlingual repetition priming was found for both cognates and noncognates. The implications of these results for the influence of the factor proficiency level are discussed.     

Dissociating language and word meaning in the bilingual brain

How do bilingual (or multilingual) persons keep different languages apart and switch between them as needs arise? Crinion et al. have used an ingenious method to dissociate brain regions sensitive to word meaning from those sensitive to the combination of meaning and language. This work should stimulate further research examining the role of subcortical areas in language processing and in context-appropriate language production.     

Stroop effects in bilingual translation

In two experiments, bilinguals proficient in English and Spanish translated words from one language to the other. In each experiment, following the target word to be translated, distractor words were presented after a short (200-msec) or long (500-msec) stimulus onset asynchrony. In Experiment 1, the distractor words appeared in the language of production and were related to the meaning or form of the spoken translation. The results replicated past studies in demonstrating that semantically related distractor words produced Stroop-type interference, whereas form-related distractor words produced facilitation. In Experiment 2, the distractors appeared in the language of input and were related to the meaning or form of the target word itself. In contrast to the results of Experiment 1, there were only marginal effects of the distractors on translation performance. These results suggest that language cues related to the nature of the input in translation may serve to reduce competition among lexical competitors during lexicalization. The contrast between these results and those in bilingual picture-word interference studies provides important constraints for models of language production and for claims about the locus of language selection.     

Analytical competence and language impairment in aphasia

Matched groups of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, brain-damaged patients without aphasia and chronic schizophrenics were tested in a nonverbal matching task where the subject had to indicate which of two pictures was more closely linked to a clue picture. Eight additional verbal and nonverbal reference tasks were administered. Both aphasic groups performed worse than brain-damaged controls when the identification of individual attributes or actions shared by clue and referent was required, but were unimpaired when the two had a set of referential-situational associations in common. Factor analyses resulted for both groups in two factors, one of which represents general Language Impairment. For the Broca's aphasics this factor was closely related to general organic deficit as measured by the Trail Making Test; for the Wernicke's aphasics it was associated with tasks which might be considered illustrative of analytical competence in isolating and comparing individual features of objects or concepts.     

Neural aspects of second language representation and language control

A basic issue in the neurosciences of language is whether an L2 can be processed through the same neural mechanism underlying L1 acquisition and processing. In the present paper I review data from functional neuroimaging studies focusing on grammatical and lexico-semantic processing in bilinguals. The available evidence indicates that the L2 seems to be acquired through the same neural structures responsible for L1 acquisition. This fact is also observed for grammar acquisition in late L2 learners contrary to what one may expect from critical period accounts. However, neural differences for an L2 may be observed, in terms of more extended activity of the neural system mediating L1 processing. These differences may disappear once a more 'native-like' proficiency is established, reflecting a change in language processing mechanisms: from controlled processing for a weak L2 system (i.e., a less proficient L2) to more automatic processing. The neuroimaging data reviewed in this paper also support the notion that language control is a crucial aspect specific to the bilingual language system. The activity of brain areas related to cognitive control during the processing of a 'weak' L2 may reflect competition and conflict between languages which may be resolved with the intervention of these areas.     

The language-specific nature of grammatical development: evidence from bilingual language learners

The fact that early lexical and grammatical acquisition are strongly correlated has been cited as evidence against the view that the language faculty is composed of dissociable and autonomous modules (Bates & Goodman, 1997). However, previous studies have not yet eliminated the possibility that lexical-grammar associations may be attributable to language-general individual differences (e.g. children who are good at learning words are good at learning grammar). Parent report assessments of toddlers who are simultaneously learning English and Spanish (n = 113) allow an examination of the specificity of lexical-grammar relationships while holding child factors constant. Within-language vocabulary-grammar associations were stronger than cross-language relationships, even after controlling for age, proportion of language exposure, general language skill and reporter bias. Similar patterns were found based on naturalistic language samples (n = 22), ruling out a methodological artifact. These results are consistent with the view that grammar learning is specifically tied to lexical progress in a given language and provide further support for strong lexical-grammatical continuity early in acquisition.     

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.     

Patterns of figurative language competence in adult speakers

Summary In an attempt to discover patterns of adult figurative language use, preference and comprehension, 30 Ss were asked to complete 4 different tasks: a composition, a test of simile preference, a test of simile production, and a test of metaphoric comprehension. Each test provided scores for both novel and clichéed usage. The composition task was also scored for total words while preference and production tasks were scored for literal usage, thus producing a total of 11 dependent variables across the complete set of tasks.Results revealed that Ss selected a higher number of novel figures under choice relative to production conditions. Correlational results revealed relationships across all 4 tasks for the categories of novel and frozen usage although certain tasks (i.e., simile preference and production) were more sensitive to novel diction while others (comprehension) were more sensitive to frozen diction. Within-task correlations, on the other hand, showed unique patterns for each of the tasks. Factor analyses of these correlations were found to produce a series of consistent three-factor solutions with the first of these factors concerned primarily with novel diction, the second with both novel and frozen comprehension, and the third primarily with frozen diction.Taken in combination, present results were interpreted to mean that while the distinction between novel and frozen is a meaningful one, specific task requirements can and do moderate the pattern of relationships obtained. This suggests that figurative language competence may not be a unitary process but one that is strongly affected by specific task and situational constraints and that future work, both methodological and theoretical, must take these factors into account.