The iconicity advantage in sign production: The case of bimodal bilinguals

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and noniconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal bilinguals named the pictures either using a noun construction that involved the production of the sign corresponding to the picture or using a marked demonstrative pronoun construction replacing the picture sign. In this last condition, the pictures were colored and participants were instructed to name the pronoun together with the color. The iconicity advantage was reliable in the noun utterance but not in the marked demonstrative pronoun utterance. In a third condition, the colored pictures were presented as distractor stimuli and participants required to name the color. In this last condition, distractor pictures with iconic signs elicited faster naming latencies than non-iconic signs. The results suggest that the advantage of iconic signs in production arises at the level of semantic-tophonological links. In addition, we conclude that bimodal bilinguals and native signers do not differ in terms of the activation flow within the sign production system

Language and Culture

Language pervades social life. It is a primary means by which we gain access to the contents of others\u27 minds and establish shared understanding of the reality. Meanwhile, there is an enormous amount of linguistic diversity among human populations. Depending on what counts as a language, there are 3,000 to 10,000 living languages in the world, although a quarter of the world’s languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers and half have fewer than 10,000 (Crystal, 1997). Not surprisingly, a key question in culture and psychology research concerns the role of language in cultural processes. The present chapter focuses on two issues that have received by far the greatest amount of research attention from cultural researchers. First, how does language and human cultures co-evolve? Second, what are the non-linguistic cognitive effects of using a certain language? Does speaking different languages orient individuals to see and experience the external reality differently? The scope of the present chapter does not permit a comprehensive review of all pertinent research; only a selected sample of studies will be used to illustrate the main ideas in the present chapter

Gender congruency between languages influence second-language comprehension: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

In the present study we explore whether gender congruency between languages modulates bilinguals’ access to their second language words presented in isolation. We predicted that accessing L2 words that have a different gender across languages (gender-incongruent) would be more costly and require more effort than accessing same-gender words (gender-congruent) due to language co-activation, even when no access to L1 was required to perform the task. Additionally, we intended to shed some light into the mechanism underlying the gender congruency effect. To these aims, we compared the performance of Spanish native speakers with that of Italian-Spanish bilinguals (Italian native speakers) during a lexical decision task. The participants saw Spanish words that were gender-congruent and gender-incongruent between languages while event related potentials were recorded. Moreover, as an additional manipulation, we selected nouns that in both languages could be ambiguous or unambiguous. With the aim to examine whether the underlying mechanism is activation of multiple information during word processing, we focused on the N400 component, related with the effort to integrate lexical-semantic information: higher N400 amplitudes indicate greater effort. According to our prediction, Italian-Spanish bilinguals produced more errors and evoked larger N400 amplitudes when accessing gender-incongruent than gender-congruent words, while no differences appeared for Spanish native speakers between conditions. These results indicate that gender-incongruent words are harder to integrate compared with gender-congruent words, and that bilinguals automatically activate the grammatical gender of both languages during L2 language comprehension. Nevertheless, the results do not seem to support the assumption of a similar mechanism responsible for the gender congruency and the ambiguity effects. In short, the gender-congruency effect seems to originate due to activation of multiple information at the lexical level which generates difficulties to integrate at the semantic level during word access.This work has been supported by Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (RED2018-102615-T), by Feder Andalucía (A-SEJ-416-UGR20) to D.P., by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-111359 GB-I00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033) and by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili to P. F. (2019PFR-URV-B2-32). Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Granada / CBUA

What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control.

Epub 2019 Mar 28.In the current study, we set out to investigate language control, which is the process that minimizes cross-language interference, during bilingual language comprehension. According to current theories of bilingual language comprehension, language-switch costs, which are a marker for reactive language control, should be observed. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this is not always the case. Furthermore, little to no evidence for language-mixing costs, which are a marker for proactive language control, has been observed in the bilingual language comprehension literature. This is in line with current theories of bilingual language comprehension, as they do not explicitly account for proactive language control. In the current study, we further investigated these two markers of language control and found no evidence for comprehension-based language-switch costs in six experiments, even though other types of switch costs were observed with the exact same setup (i.e., task-switch costs, stimulus modality-switch costs, and production-based language-switch costs). Furthermore, only one out of three experiments showed comprehension-based language-mixing costs, providing the first tentative evidence for proactive language control during bilingual language comprehension. The implications of the absence and occurrence of these costs are discussed in terms of processing speed and parallel language activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 706128. This research was also supported by grants ANR-11-LABX-0036 (BLRI), ANR-16-CONV-0002 (ILCB), and ANR-11-IDEX-0001-02 from the French National Research Council (ANR)

Cross-linguistic activation in bilingual sentence processing: the role of word class meaning

This study investigates how categorial (word class) semantics influences cross-linguistic interactions when reading in L2. Previous homograph studies paid little attention to the possible influence of different word classes in the stimulus material on cross-linguistic activation. The present study examines the word recognition performance of Dutch-English bilinguals who performed a lexical decision task to word targets appearing in a sentence. To determine the influence of word class meaning, the critical words either showed a word class overlap (e. g. the homograph tree [ noun], which means "step" in Dutch) or not (e.g. big [ADJ], which is a noun in Dutch meaning "piglet"). In the condition of word class overlap, a facilitation effect was observed, suggesting that both languages were active. When there was no word class overlap, the facilitation effect disappeared. This result suggests that categorial meaning affects the word recognition process of bilinguals

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Phonological priming from the second to the first language

In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models