Bilingualism: Language and Cognition最新文献

Recent studies suggest that similarity in emotional features and concreteness are critical cues underlying word association in native speakers. However, the lexical organization of a foreign language is less understood. This study aims to examine the structure of word associations within the mental lexicon of a foreign (English) and a native language. To this end, 145 native Spanish-speakers produced three lexical associates to cue words in both the foreign and native language. We observed that the associates were more neutrally valenced in the foreign language. Moreover, as cue words increased in their arousal, the produced associates were less arousing in the foreign language. Thus, the structure of these lexical associations could account for prior evidence of emotional detachment in foreign languages. Finally, as cues were more abstract, the foreign language associates were more abstract. Our findings revealed that the linguistic context modulated the lexical associations.

Foreign language can either enhance decision-making by triggering more deliberation or worsen it due to cognitive overload. We tested these two hypotheses in one response bias: acquiescence. In three experiments, 413 participants made dichotomous decisions about whether 100 personality traits described them or not. Participants showed more acquiescence in a foreign language (vs. native), giving more certifying responses when deciding on known traits. Reaction time results suggest that a foreign language particularly impacts rejection more than certification of their comprehension. These findings support the cognitive overload hypothesis and provide valuable insights for the influence of language on response bias.

Bilinguals experience diminished emotion when using their foreign compared with their native language. The diminished emotion has been shown to lead to more lenient moral evaluations in a foreign language. Here we show that non-native speakers of English are less sensitive to emotional mitigating circumstances of a crime than native speakers, presumably because of the diminished experience emotion. This can lead non-native speakers to provide harsher, rather than more lenient, evaluations. Native and non-native speakers of English recommended sentence duration for crimes committed because of mitigating emotional circumstances (e.g., fraud to pay spouse's medical treatment) or for selfish reasons (e.g., buying luxury goods). Native English speakers differentiated more between the two types of scenarios than non-native speakers did. The study thus provides preliminary evidence that processing information in a foreign language can influence decisions, and that the directionality of the effect depends on the role of emotion in the context.

Do bilinguals have similar bilingual control mechanisms in speaking and writing? The present study investigated the patterns of switch costs (reflecting reactive language control) and mixing costs (reflecting proactive language control) between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) in spoken and written productions and whether these patterns could be modulated by response-stimulus intervals (RSIs). In two experiments, unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals completed a cued language switching task in spoken naming (Experiment 1) and written naming (Experiment 2), respectively. The results revealed asymmetrical switch costs (i.e., the larger cost in L1 than in L2) in spoken and written productions in the short RSI condition. However, there were asymmetrical mixing costs in spoken production and symmetrical mixing costs in written production both in the short and long RSIs. These findings suggest that for spoken and written productions, reactive language control operates in similar mechanisms, while proactive language control operates in specific mechanisms.

We investigated three aspects of paired associate learning of vocabulary in an unfamiliar language: monolingual-bilingual differences, effects of dominance and language proficiency, and the possible role of associative strategies. Spanish–English bilinguals (48 English-dominant and 48 Spanish-dominant) and English-speaking monolinguals (n = 48) learned Swahili–English and Swahili-Spanish word pairs. Learning was assessed using cued recall (Swahili cue or Swahili response) and associative recognition tests. English-dominant bilinguals did not outperform English monolinguals on any learning measure. Cued recall accuracy was higher when learning through the dominant language than through the non-dominant language, whether the Swahili words were cues or responses. Proficiency scores in the known language were positively correlated with cued recall accuracy, whether the cue or the response was in Swahili, indicating that proficiency effects occurred not in retrievability of known words but in learning of associations. Bilingual and monolingual participants did not differ in their reported use of associative strategies.

Prosody refers to stress and intonation patterns in a language. Previous studies have found that prosodic sensitivity (PS) and executive functions can affect reading comprehension in first (L1) and second languages (L2). The current study examined these factors among a group of L1 Mandarin speakers learning L2 English who participated in a series of tasks measuring phonological awareness, Mandarin tone sensitivity, English PS, along with three specific executive functions – namely, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and working memory. The results demonstrated that Mandarin tone sensitivity and cognitive flexibility mediated English PS and reading. A simple slope analysis showed that PS positively predicted word reading for readers with higher but not lower cognitive flexibility. These results imply that PS in L2 reading is affected by both prosodic transfer of L1 tone sensitivity and cognitive flexibility.

Both ageing and bilingualism can have positive as well as adverse cognitive effects. We investigated their combined impact on subcomponents of attention. We used the Attention Network Task to examine alerting, orienting, executive control and task-switching costs. Group comparisons revealed age-related declines for alerting alongside benefits for executive control, for mono- and bilinguals alike. For orienting, age-related decline was more pronounced for bilinguals than monolinguals. Task-switching was unaffected by age or language group. Within bilinguals, we found limited impact of individual differences in L2 proficiency, language switching or mixing: proficiency improves orienting and decreases switch costs, for young and older bilinguals alike; but no other individual differences effects were found. Thus, attention is a multi-faceted network, with clear adverse (alerting) and protective (executive control) ageing effects. We found these to be largely similar for mono- and bilinguals, with variability within bilinguals having only limited impact.