Bilingualism: Language and Cognition最新文献

Understanding high-variability speech is particularly challenging for second-language (L2) learners due to difficulties with extrinsic normalization, a perceptual strategy utilizing contextual cues to overcome speech variability. This study investigates the neural correlates of these difficulties among Mandarin speakers learning Cantonese, using EEG. Behaviorally, Mandarin learners demonstrated a significant yet considerably reduced ability to normalize Cantonese tone variability with contexts compared to native Cantonese speakers. EEG analysis showed that while native speakers engage multiple neural components (N1, P2, and LPC) for acoustic, phonetic/phonological, and cognitive adjustments in extrinsic normalization, Mandarin learners only activated P2, focusing on phonetic/phonological adjustments. This discrepancy underscores the multi-faceted nature of successful extrinsic normalization, which L2 learners fail to fully engage. L2 immersion significantly improves extrinsic normalization, particularly at the cognitive-adjustment stage. Overall, this study illuminates the intricate nature of poor extrinsic normalization in L2 learners and the importance of L2 immersion for effective L2 speech perception.

Bilinguals with aphasia routinely experience anomia in one or both of their languages that may be ameliorated by language treatment. Traditionally, treatment response has been captured by binary scoring systems that measure the presence or absence of improvement without examining how word retrieval attempts may change over time as a function of treatment. This study analyzed word retrieval errors and subsequent treatment outcomes for a group of 48 Spanish-English bilinguals with aphasia to determine if longitudinal error patterns could capture language recovery. Results revealed naming improvement for trained words in the treated language and translations of trained words in the untreated language. Specific types of word errors at baseline were associated with overall improvement in both languages; furthermore, patterns of responses changed over time as a function of lexical-semantic treatment. These results demonstrate that error analyses may characterize bilingual treatment outcomes and provide new evidence for mechanisms of impaired word retrieval.

We investigated the interactive effects of bilingualism and sleep on executive functioning at the behavioral level. We conducted two experiments using two independent samples of bilingual young adults, the Flanker task to assess executive performance, the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index to measure retrospective sleep quality over a one-month period and the Insomnia Severity Index to assess insomnia-related symptoms. In Experiment 1, we registered bilingualism effects on executive performance in poor, but not in good sleepers. In Experiment 2, the magnitude of bilingual effects increased with increasing severity of insomnia symptoms. We conclude that when poor sleep quality and insomnia negatively affect cognitive resources, bilingualism-related cognitive effects emerge more prominently. This suggests higher degrees of bilingualism may compensate detrimental effects of poor sleep quality and insomnia on executive functioning. We suggest that cognitive research in bilingualism and sleep could benefit from controlling for interindividual variability in sleep quality and vice versa.

This study tested whether native Chinese (L1) readers whose second language (L2) was English could activate L2 translations of L1 words during L1 sentence reading. Chinese–English bilinguals read Chinese sentences silently, each containing a target word whose parafoveal preview was manipulated. To test cross-language semantic activation, each target word was paired with an identical, an unrelated and a translation-related preview that shared an L2 translation (e.g., 政黨, party as a political group) with the target word (e.g., 派對, party as a social gathering). Compared to the unrelated previews, the translation-related previews induced shorter target-word viewing times, despite no phonological/orthographic overlap. Furthermore, the highly proficient L2 readers showed earlier priming effects than did the average readers. Our results suggest that bilinguals activate lexical representations in both languages automatically and non-selectively, even when the task requires activation of one language only, and that the L2 lexical activation is modulated by L2 proficiency.

Recent studies showed contradictory results with regard to the implementation of proactive language control during bilingual sentence production. To add novel evidence to this debate, the current study investigated the blocked language order effect, a measure of proactive language control that has previously only been examined in single-word production. More specifically, bilingual participants completed a network description task, using their L1 in Blocks 1 and 3 and their L2 in Block 2. Results showed increased language intrusions in Block 3 compared to Block 1. This pattern indicates that proactive language control can be implemented during bilingual sentence production.

How does the bilingual experience affect online processing? The distribution of lexical items shared between monolinguals and bilinguals can differ greatly. One critical difference is how code-switching allows more variability in the relative co-occurrence of words. The current study uses a visual world paradigm to test whether the relative distribution between Spanish gender-marked determiners (“el,” “la”) and the non-marked English determiner (“the”) predict the Spanish–English bilingual’s ability to predict and/or integrate an incoming noun. While we replicate a previously observed asymmetry among Spanish–English bilinguals between the masculine “el” and feminine “la,” our cluster permutation test results reveal differences in how bilinguals predict and integrate nouns when preceded by “el” versus “la” or “the.” Comparing our results to existing corpus data, we argue that bilinguals rely on the distributional norms they experience across both single-language and code-switched contexts to facilitate online processing.