Bilingualism: Language and Cognition最新文献

Early learning of a second language at home has been found to be beneficial for children’s cognitive development, including their ability to ascribe mental states to others. We investigated whether second language learning in an educational setting can accelerate children’s sensitivity to a communication partner’s perspective and whether the amount of exposure to second language education makes a difference. We tested three groups of English monolingual four-five year old children with varying language exposure at the beginning of their first year at primary school and 24 weeks later. Children attending bilingual schools and children with weekly second language lessons exhibited similar accelerated development of communicative perspective-taking skills compared to children without second language provision. Such advances were not related to other cognitive advances. Thus, limited foreign language teaching might boost young children’s development in communicative perspective-taking skills, providing an enhanced basis for their social competence development.

This study examined English VOT productions by 37 Spanish-English bilingual children and 37 matched functional monolinguals, all aged 3–6 years, from the same Latinx community. It also assessed the bilinguals’ Spanish stop productions and investigated the effects of age and language exposure on their VOT productions. The results revealed credible between-group differences on English voiced, but not voiceless, stops, with shorter VOTs for bilinguals. However, both groups exhibited similar pre-voicing levels, which may suggest an effect of the community language, Spanish, not only on the bilinguals’ English VOT patterns but also the monolinguals’. The study also found cross-linguistic differentiation of voiceless stops, but not voiced ones, in the bilinguals’ productions and revealed effects of age and exposure not only on VOT in Spanish but also in the majority language, English. These findings have important implications for the conceptualization of monolingual-bilingual comparisons in settings where the community and majority language coexist.

Researchers have argued that grouping heterogeneous linguistic profiles under a dichotomous condition might mask the cognitive effects of bilingualism. The current study used two different analysis approaches (i.e., continuous versus dichotomous) to examine inhibitory control in a sample of 239 young adult bilinguals. Dividing the sample into dichotomous groups based on L2 proficiency (i.e., high-proficient versus low-proficient) and L2 AoA (i.e., early versus late) did not lead to reliable group differences in any of the measurements used. However, the use of a continuous measure revealed that higher L2 proficiency predicted better visual inhibition and earlier L2 AoA was associated with better auditory inhibition. Furthermore, the observed differences were limited to tasks involving stimulus–stimulus competition, but not stimulus–response competition. These findings shed new light on the importance of conceptualising bilingualism as a continuous measure rather than a dichotomous measure and previous research on bilingual performance in different cognitive tasks.

This study tests whether prediction error underlies structural priming in a later-learnt L2 across two visual world eye-tracking priming experiments. Experiment 1 investigates priming when learners encounter verbs biased to double-object-datives (DO, “pay”) or prepositional-object-datives (PO, “send”) in the other structure in prime sentences. L1-German–L2-English learners read prime sentences crossing verb bias and structure (DO/PO). Subsequently, they heard target sentences – with unbiased verbs (“show”) – while viewing visual scenes. In line with implicit learning models, gaze data revealed priming and prediction-error effects, namely, more predictive looks consistent with PO following PO primes with DO-bias verbs. Priming in comprehension persisted into (unprimed) production, indicating that priming by prediction error leads to longer-term learning. Experiment 2 investigates the effects of target verb bias on error-based priming. Priming and prediction-error effects were reduced for targets with non-alternating verbs (“donate”) that only allow PO structures, suggesting learners’ knowledge of the L2 grammar modulates prediction-error-based priming.

Research on the cognitive neural mechanisms of language control often overlooks the role of rewards. To investigate how reversal rewards affect bilingual language switching during observational learning, we conducted a dual-brain electroencephalography (EEG) study. Participants, classified as direct learners or observers, performed a voluntary language-switching task under dynamic reward conditions. Our results demonstrated that both direct learners and observers exhibited high correct acquisition rates for the switch and non-switch behaviors in both pre- and post-reversal phases. Notably, direct learners and observers showed reduced switch costs in the post-reversal phase, highlighting enhanced language control efficiency. EEG analyses revealed that direct learners exhibited late positive component (LPC) switch costs in both pre- and post-reversal phases, while observers showed LPC switch costs only in the post-reversal phase. These findings support the Adaptive Control Hypothesis by highlighting the adaptability of language control mechanisms in response to dynamic reward environments during direct and observational learning.

Mastering prosody is a different task for adults learning a second language and infants acquiring their first. While prosody crucially aids the process of L1 acquisition, for adult L2 learners it is often considerably challenging. Is it because of an age-related decline in the language-learning ability or because of unfavorable learning conditions? We investigated whether adults can auditorily sensitize to the prosody of a novel language, and whether such sensitization is affected by orthographic input. After 5 minutes of exposure to Māori, Czech listeners could reliably recognize this language in a post-test using low-pass filtered clips of Māori and Malay. Recognition accuracy was lower for participants exposed to the novel-language speech along with deep-orthography transcriptions or orthography with unfamiliar characters. Adults can thus attune to novel-language prosody, but orthography hampers this ability. Language-learning theories and applications may need to reconsider the consequences of providing orthographic input to beginning second-language learners.

In this study, we describe the performance of 62 newly immigrated children to France at a nonword repetition task (LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR) designed to evaluate bilingual children’s syllable structure. Children were between 6;0 and 9;1 and had diverse language backgrounds. They participated in our study during their first year of exposure to French. The majority of our children exhibited a good performance on the task. The variation observed is related to: (i) the properties of the nonwords: items with complex syllables are more difficult, as are items with three syllables in length; (ii) phonological awareness: children with a more developed L2 phonological awareness perform better at the task; and (iii) receptive vocabulary size: children with a larger L2 vocabulary size perform better at the task. Overall, our findings provide support for the argument that the LITMUS-QU-NWR-FR task can be used shortly after the onset of exposure to the L2.