The effect of L2 proficiency on the declarative and procedural memory systems of bilinguais: a psycholinguistic study

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro de Comunicação e Expressão. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras/Inglês e Literatura Correspondente, Florianópolis, 2012A memória é um dos processos mentais que compõe a cognição humana. Ela é uma das partes fundamentais do processamento cognitivo, juntamente com a atenção, a percepção, o raciocínio e a linguagem. É através destas funções que os humanos são capazes de interagir com outros seres humanos e com o ambiente em que vivem. Para os bilíngues, esta interação ocorre através do conhecimento e do uso de, pelo menos, duas línguas, o que por sua vez envolve processos cognitivos e linguísticos que são sistematicamente diferentes daqueles empregados por monolíngues (Bialystok, 2010). Nesse sentido, ser bilíngue requer o gerenciamento e o desenvolvimento apropriado de dois sistemas linguísticos, nos quais as habilidades mentais de gerenciamento devem se estender a aspectos da cognição tais como a atenção, a resolução de conflitos e o controle executivo (Bialystok, Craig, Green & Gollan, 2009). Estudos recentes demonstraram que o bilinguismo parece trazer vantagens e contribuições a certas habilidades cognitivas, que incluem as funções executivas e a memória de trabalho (Bialystok, Craik & Luk, 2008). Com base na pesquisa sobre os efeitos do bilinguismo nas funções cognitivas, o presente estudo investiga se o bilinguismo afeta os sistemas de memória declarativa e procedural positivamente. Quarenta participantes jovens adultos foram divididos em três grupos: dois grupos experimentais e um grupo controle. Dezesseis participantes bilíngues do par linguístico português-inglês de alta proficiência em L2 compuseram o primeiro grupo experimental. O segundo grupo experimental foi composto por dezesseis participantes bilíngues do par linguístico português-inglês de baixa proficiência em L2. O terceiro grupo foi o grupo controle, composto por oito participantes monolíngues de Português brasileiro. Todos os participantes foram testados em quatro tarefas psicolinguísticas desenvolvidas em português brasileiro (L1) com o objetivo de avaliar os sistemas de memória declarativa e procedural dessa população. Antes de serem submetidos às tarefas, os participantes foram submetidos a um de três tipos de testes de proficiência. Os bilíngues com baixa proficiência desempenharam o Cambridge ESOL ?Key English Test?, enquanto os de alta proficiência desempenharam o Cambridge ESOL ?Preliminary English Test? (PET). O grupo controle de monolíngues desempenhou o Mini Teste de Linguagem em Inglês, desenvolvido para os fins do presente estudo com o objetivo específico de controlar o conhecimento em inglês desses participantes. Nas tarefas psicolinguísticas, as variáveis dependentes foram tempo de reação (RT) e acurácia (ACC). Comparações múltiplas foram realizadas nos dados obtidos dos três grupos. De maneira geral, os resultados mostraram que a maioria das comparações feitas entre bilíngues e monolíngues (considerando o tempo de resposta, o desvio padrão e a acurácia dos participantes em todas as tarefas) favoreceu os bilíngues no desempenho em tarefas de memória, especialmente naquelas destinadas à avaliação da memória declarativa. Para as comparações entre o grupo de alta proficiência, o de baixa proficiência e os monolíngues, nas tarefas linguísticas, houve uma diferença significativa no desempenho do grupo de alta proficiência, em relação aos grupos de baixa proficiência e os monolíngues, sugerindo um efeito positivo da proficiência em L2 nessas tarefas. Para as comparações entre os mesmos grupos nas tarefas não-linguísticas, diferenças significativas também foram encontradas no desempenho do grupo de alta proficiência. Todos esses resultados, de forma geral, indicam que a proficiência em L2 parece contribuir de forma positiva para um desempenho mais acurado em tarefas de memória declarativa e procedural. Esses resultados são discutidos à luz de estudos teóricos e empíricos sobre memória humana, bilinguismo e proficiência.Abstract: Memory is one of the mental processes that compose human cognition. It is one of the fundamental parts of cognitive processing, which also includes attention, perception, reasoning, and language. It is through these functions that humans are capable of interacting with other human beings and with the world. For bilinguals, this interaction takes place through the knowledge and use of at least two languages, which involves cognitive and linguistic processes that are systematically different from those engaged in monolingual language use (Bialystok, 2010). In this sense, being bilingual entails the management and appropriate development of at least two language systems, in which skills of mental management should apply to aspects of cognition such as attention, conflict resolution, and executive control (Bialystok, Craig, Green & Gollan, 2009). Previous research has demonstrated that bilingualism seems to bring advantages to certain cognitive abilities, including executive functioning and working memory (Bialystok, Craik & Luk, 2008). Based on the assumptions presented above, the current study goes a step further to investigate whether bilingualism affects declarative and procedural memory systems positively. Forty young adult participants were divided into 3 groups: two experimental and one control group. The first experimental group consisted of 16 high L2 proficiency Portuguese-English bilinguals. The second experimental group consisted of 16 low L2 proficiency Portuguese-English bilinguals. The third group was the control group and consisted of 8 Brazilian Portuguese monolinguals. All participants were tested in four psycholinguistic tasks, designed in Brazilian Portuguese (L1), which aimed at assessing declarative and procedural memory. Prior to testing sessions, all participants were submitted to one of three types of proficiency test. Bilinguals at a low level of proficiency performed the Cambridge ESOL ?Key English Test?, whereas those at a high proficiency performed the Cambridge ESOL ?Preliminary English Test? (PET). The control group of monolinguals performed the Mini Language English Test, designed for the purposes of the present study to control for their knowledge of English. In the psycholinguistic tasks, the dependent variables were reaction time (RT) and accuracy (ACC), and multiple comparisons were run for data from the three groups. Overall results showed that most of the comparisons between bilinguals and monolinguals favored bilinguals in the performance of memory tasks, especially those aimed at assessing declarative memory. For the comparisons between the high proficiency group, the low proficiency group, and monolinguals, in the linguistic tasks, there was a very significant difference in performance favoring the high proficiency group in relation to their low proficiency and monolingual counterparts, suggesting a positive effect of L2 proficiency on these tasks. For the comparisons between the same groups in the nonlinguistic tasks, there were also statistically significant differences for the high proficiency group overall performance. Taken together, the results of the present study indicate that a higher level of proficiency in an L2 seems to contribute to more accurate performance on declarative and procedural memory tasks. These results are discussed in light of the theoretical and empirical literature on human memory, bilingualism and language proficienc

Distributional effects and individual differences in L2 morphology learning

Second language (L2) learning outcomes may depend on the structure of the input and learners’ cognitive abilities. This study tested whether less predictable input might facilitate learning and generalization of L2 morphology while evaluating contributions of statistical learning ability, nonverbal intelligence, phonological short-term memory, and verbal working memory. Over three sessions, 54 adults were exposed to a Russian case-marking paradigm with a balanced or skewed item distribution in the input. Whereas statistical learning ability and nonverbal intelligence predicted learning of trained items, only nonverbal intelligence also predicted generalization of case-marking inflections to new vocabulary. Neither measure of temporary storage capacity predicted learning. Balanced, less predictable input was associated with higher accuracy in generalization but only in the initial test session. These results suggest that individual differences in pattern extraction play a more sustained role in L2 acquisition than instructional manipulations that vary the predictability of lexical items in the input

The different time course of phonotactic constraint learning in children and adults : evidence from speech errors

Speech errors typically respect the speaker’s implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /ŋ/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally-induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on another phoneme within the sequence (e.g., /t/ can only be an onset if the medial vowel is /i/), but not earlier than the second day of training. Thus far, no work has been done with children. In the current 4-day experiment, a group of Dutch-speaking adults and nine-year-old children were asked to rapidly recite sequences of novel word-forms (e.g., kieng nief siet hiem) that were consistent with phonotactics of the spoken Dutch language. Within the procedure of the experiment, some consonants (i.e., /t/ and /k/) were restricted to onset or coda position depending on the medial vowel (i.e., /i/ or “ie” versus /øː/ or “eu”). Speech errors in adults revealed a learning effect for the novel constraints on the second day of learning, consistent with earlier findings. A post-hoc analysis at trial-level showed that learning was statistically reliable after an exposure of 120 sequence-trials (including a consolidation period). In contrast, cChildren, however, started learning the constraints already on the first day. More precisely, the effect appeared significantly after an exposure of 24 sequences. These findings indicate that children are rapid implicit learners of novel phonotactics, which bears important implications for theorizing about developmental sensitivities in language learning

Building a translation competence model

Autors llistats per ordre alfabètic. Investigadora principal: A. Hurtado Albi

Investigating Decision Support Techniques for Automating Cloud Service Selection

The compass of Cloud infrastructure services advances steadily leaving users in the agony of choice. To be able to select the best mix of service offering from an abundance of possibilities, users must consider complex dependencies and heterogeneous sets of criteria. Therefore, we present a PhD thesis proposal on investigating an intelligent decision support system for selecting Cloud based infrastructure services (e.g. storage, network, CPU).Comment: Accepted by IEEE Cloudcom 2012 - PhD consortium trac

An account of cognitive flexibility and inflexibility for a complex dynamic task

Problem solving involves adapting known problem solving methods and strategies to the task at hand (Schunn & Reder, 2001) and cognitive flexibility is considered to be “the human ability to adapt the cognitive processing strategies to face new and unexpected conditions of the environment” (Cañas et al., 2005, p. 95). This work presents an ACT-R 6.0 model of complex problem solving behavior for the dynamic microworld game FireChief (Omodei & Wearing, 1995) that models the performance of participants predisposed to behave either more or less flexibly based on the nature of previous training on the task (Cañas et al., 2005). The model exhibits a greater or lesser degree of cognitive inflexibility in problem solving strategy choice reflecting variations in task training. The model provides an explanation of dynamic task performance compatible with the Competing Strategies paradigm (Taatgen et al., 2006) by creating a second layer of strategy competition that renders it more flexible with respect to strategy learning, and provides an explanation of cognitive inflexibility based on reward mechanism

Morphologically complex words in L1 and L2 processing: Evidence from masked priming experiments in English

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.</jats:p