Bilingualism: Language and Cognition最新文献

Visual attention span (VAS) refers to the number of visual elements processed simultaneously in a multielement array. It is causally related to reading skills and may be impaired in readers with dyslexia. VAS is influenced by orthographic depth with opaque orthographies boosting it. Such orthography-specific VAS modulations are subject to crosslinguistic interactions in early biliterates, leading to advantages associated with learning to read in an opaque orthography. However, little is known about potential VAS bootstrapping effects in late biliterates. This study investigates potential VAS modulation in late biliterates with and without dyslexia. Participants were first language (L1) Italian native speakers (transparent orthography) learning English as a second language (L2). Our results show that the VAS capacity of typical readers is modulated by English orthographic knowledge, providing the first evidence that experience with a nonnative orthography boosts VAS skills also in late biliterates. This effect was reduced in dyslexic learners, possibly due to a VAS deficit.

This study investigates linguistic convergence in Spanish–English bilinguals’ demonstrative use in English (this/that) and Spanish (este/ese). Participants completed a task that tested the influence of speaker-referent distance on demonstrative use. Study 1 includes Spanish-speaking monolinguals in Mexico, English-speaking monolinguals in the USA, and Spanish–English bilinguals who were born in the USA or arrived at a young age. Results show that speaker-referent distance constrained all groups’ demonstrative use; however, this effect was weaker in the bilinguals’ Spanish as compared to the Spanish-speaking monolinguals. Study 2 focuses on the bilinguals’ demonstratives. Group-level and individual analyses present evidence for linguistic convergence: the bilinguals’ usage patterns were similar across their languages. Additionally, language dominance predicted usage patterns: the more English-dominant the participant, the greater the likelihood of producing proximal demonstratives for near and far referents alike. This pattern mirrors common diachronic changes, supporting the view that bilinguals may propel language change.

A comprehensive database of emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) scores for 1,122 words in second-language (L2) English was provided and aided in selecting L2 English emotion-label words. EmoPro refers to the degree to which a word clearly represents or conveys an emotion. The results showed that EmoPro was influenced by various factors, including valence, arousal, socialness, age of acquisition (AoA) and concreteness. EmoPro in the L2 context demonstrated its ability to predict naming and lexical decision performance. The similarities observed between EmoPro in the L2 and in the first language (L1) exhibited comparable correlations with other emotional and semantic factors and shared associations with predictors in the L1. This study also serves as a valuable tool for research on L2 emotion words, especially in the selection of prototypical emotion-label words in L2 English.

This study examined the linguistic and cognitive characteristics of two groups of Italian preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD): one group of monolingual Italian speakers and another of Italian-Slovenian bilinguals. The assessment focused on executive functions (EFs) (i.e., phonological working memory and inhibitory control) and linguistic abilities, which involved a multilevel analysis of discourse production. The bilingual group outperformed the monolingual group on tasks measuring EFs. While the two groups showed similar performance across several linguistic measures, the bilingual children demonstrated superior grammatical comprehension, albeit with high variability. A similar level of variability was observed in the bilingual group’s phonological discrimination abilities. Both grammatical comprehension and phonological discrimination were significantly correlated with EFs. These findings are discussed in the context of current theories of linguistic development in bilingual children with DLD.

Previous research has found that metaphor comprehension is often more challenging in L2 than in L1 because of the prioritization of literal meanings, but the effect of cross-cultural conceptual differences and the role of inhibitory control during L2 metaphor processing remain uninvestigated. We explored these through a metaphor-induced lexical forgetting paradigm (Experiment 1), a metaphor interpretation task (Experiment 2), and an eye-tracking reading task (Experiment 3) to evaluate competing theories. Inhibitory control did not play a significant role during reading culturally congruent metaphors as it did for culturally incongruent ones. However, interpreting both kinds of L2 metaphors involved more inhibitory control than literals, even after explicit explanatory contexts. Although literal meanings (and culturally incongruent L1 metaphorical meanings) of L2 metaphors may always be activated, inhibition involvement depends on both task requirements and metaphor properties. These can be explained by the extended graded salience view and the predictive processing framework.

This study explored the relationship between multifaceted multilingualism and cognitive shifting through a task-switching paradigm using fMRI. Multilingualism was modeled from both convergent (i.e., integrated multilingual index) and divergent (i.e., L2 proficiency, interpreting training, language entropy) perspectives. Participants identified letters or numbers based on task cues, with Repeat trials maintaining the same task and Switch trials requiring a different task. Switch cost (Switch–Repeat) was used to reflect shifting demands. Better task-switching performance was associated with a higher integrated multilingual index and interpreting training. Neuroimaging indicated that multilinguals predominantly engaged left-hemisphere regions for switching, with extensive multilingual experience requiring fewer neural resources for switch cost (i.e., more efficient processing for cognitive control). During task switching, brain connectivity was regulated locally by L2 proficiency, and globally by interpreting training. These findings underscore the importance of considering multifaceted multilingual experience to understand its impact on cognitive function and brain activity.

Effects of language switching in bilinguals have been extensively investigated, but the majority of studies have focused on switching in language production. Here we explored intrasentential switching between Chinese and English, employing a self-paced reading paradigm, with Chinese/English using radically different orthographic systems. In addition, we investigated whether L2 (English) proficiency influences switch costs. Results revealed that switch costs emerged only when switching into L1 (Chinese); by contrast, when switching into L2, a less reliable facilitatory effect was observed. L2 proficiency affected reading speed for English stimuli, but it did not directly modulate switch costs. Moreover, we have integrated various findings from previous research and identified that the use of different comparison patterns is a major contributing factor to the inconsistency in results among prior studies. We suggest that in cross-script language switching, switch costs stem from a general cognitive control mechanism rather than from activation within the bilingual mental lexicon.

In contrast to ample evidence for cross-linguistic priming of monomorphemic words, cross-linguistic representation of affixes is not well understood. The current study examines cross-linguistic prefix priming among early and late English-Spanish bilinguals, focusing on prefixes that have the same form and meaning in the two languages. We first confirm robust prefix priming among English monolingual speakers (Experiment 1). We also observe prefix priming from first-language English to second-language Spanish but only for early bilinguals (Experiment 2). On the other hand, both early and late bilinguals do not show reliable prefix priming effects that are dissociated from orthographic or semantic priming from Spanish to English (Experiment 3) or from Spanish to Spanish (Experiment 4). The results suggest that for early bilinguals, the tested prefixes in their L1 and L2 have shared representations. Less reliable results for late bilinguals may reflect their weaker sensitivity to morphological structure in a second language.