How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions?

Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they did so equally regardless of whether they also were about to describe foils. This suggests that comprehension processes can sometimes detect linguistic-ambiguity before producing it. However, once produced, speakers consistently avoided using the same linguistically ambiguous expression again for a different meaning. This suggests that production processes can successfully detect linguistic-ambiguity after-the-fact. Speakers almost always avoided nonlinguistic-ambiguity. Thus, production processes are especially sensitive to nonlinguistic- but not linguistic-ambiguity, with the latter avoided consistently only once it is already articulated.     

Individual differences in second-language proficiency: does musical ability matter?

This study examined the relation between musical ability and second-language (L2) proficiency in adult learners. L2 ability was assessed in four domains: receptive phonology, productive phonology, syntax, and lexical knowledge. Also assessed were various other factors that might explain individual differences in L2 ability, including age of L2 immersion, patterns of language use and exposure, and phonological short-term memory. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine if musical ability explained any unique variance in each domain of L2 ability after controlling for other relevant factors. Musical ability predicted L2 phonological ability (both receptive and productive) even when controlling for other factors, but did not explain unique variance in L2 syntax or lexical knowledge. These results suggest that musical skills may facilitate the acquisition of L2 sound structure and add to a growing body of evidence linking language and music.     

A new look at “the hard problem” of bilingual lexical access: evidence for language-switch costs with univalent stimuli

Considerable work has used language-switching tasks to investigate how bilinguals manage competition between languages. Language-switching costs have been argued to reflect persisting inhibition or persisting activation of a non-target language. However, these costs might instead reflect the use of bivalent stimuli (i.e. pictures or digits that can be responded to in either language). That is, language-switching costs may simply reflect a cost of selecting the task-appropriate response for a given item and so may not be reflective of bilingual lexical access [Finkbeiner, M., Almeida, J., Janssen, N., & Carramaza, A. (2006). Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5), 1075–1089]. The present study addresses this concern by having Chinese/English bilinguals switch between languages in response to inherently univalent stimuli (English words and Chinese Characters) as well as lexically univalent, but orthographically bivalent, stimuli (English words and Chinese Pinyin). Speakers showed switch costs when naming both univalent and orthographically bivalent stimuli, showing that switch costs can be found even with inherently univalent stimuli.     

Syntactic agreement attraction reflects working memory processes

Does producing syntactic agreement rely on syntactic or memory-based retrieval processes? The present study investigated the extent to which syntactic processing deficits and working memory (WM) deficits predict susceptibility to agreement attraction [Bock, K., &; Miller, C. A. (1991). Broken agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 45–93], where speakers tend to erroneously produce plural agreement for a singular subject when another noun in the sentence is grammatically plural. Four brain-injured patients with varying degrees of grammatical and WM deficits completed sentences with local nouns that matched or mismatched in number with the head noun, and that were plausible or implausible subjects. Both aspects of grammatical deficits and the extent of WM deficits predicted the extent of agreement attraction effects. These data are consistent with the proposal that producing an agreeing verb involves a cue-based search in WM for an appropriate controlling noun, which is subject to interference from other elements in memory with similar properties [cf. Badecker, W., &; Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 56(1), 65–85. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.004].     

Making psycholinguistics musical: Self-paced reading time evidence for shared processing of linguistic and musical syntax

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden path sentences, in which structurally unexpected words cause temporary syntactic processing difficulty. A musical chord accompanied each sentence segment, with the resulting sequence forming a coherent chord progression. When structurally unexpected words were paired with harmonically unexpected chords, participants showed substantially enhanced garden path effects. No such interaction was observed when the critical words violated semantic expectancy or when the critical chords violated timbral expectancy. These results support a prediction of the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (Patel, 2003), which suggests that music and language draw on a common pool of limited processing resources for integrating incoming elements into syntactic structures. Notations of the stimuli from this study may be downloaded from pbr.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Individual differences in musical training and executive functions: A latent variable approach

Learning and performing music draw on a host of cognitive abilities, and previous research has postulated that musicians might have advantages in related cognitive processes. One such aspect of cognition that may be related to musical training is executive functions (EFs), a set of top-down processes that regulate behavior and cognition according to task demands. Previous studies investigating the link between musical training and EFs have yielded mixed results and are difficult to compare. In part, this is because most studies have looked at only one specific cognitive process, and even studies looking at the same process have used different experimental tasks. Furthermore, most correlational studies have used different “musician” and “non-musician” categorizations for their comparisons, so generalizing the findings is difficult. The present study provides a more comprehensive assessment of how individual differences in musical training relate to latent measures of three separable aspects of EFs. We administered a well-validated EF battery containing multiple tasks tapping the EF components of inhibition, shifting, and working memory updating (Friedman et al. in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 201–225, 2008), as well as a comprehensive, continuous measure of musical training and sophistication (Müllensiefen et al., in PLoS ONE, 9, e89642, 2014). Musical training correlated with some individual EF tasks involving inhibition and working memory updating, but not with individual tasks involving shifting. However, musical training only predicted the latent variable of working memory updating, but not the latent variables of inhibition or shifting after controlling for IQ, socioeconomic status, and handedness. Although these data are correlational, they nonetheless suggest that musical experience places particularly strong demands specifically on working memory updating processes.