Lexical organization of language-ambiguous and language-specific words in bilinguals

Previous research has shown the importance of sublexical orthographic cues in determining the language of a given word when the two languages of a bilingual reader share the same script. In this study, we explored the extent to which cross-language sublexical characteristics of words—measured in terms of bigram frequencies—constrain selective language activation during reading. In Experiment 1, we investigated the impact of language-nonspecific and language-specific orthography in letter detection using the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm in a seemingly monolingual experimental context. In Experiment 2, we used the masked translation priming paradigm in order to better characterize the role of sublexical language cues during lexical access in bilinguals. Results show that bilinguals are highly sensitive to statistical orthographic regularities of their languages and that the absence of such cues promotes language-nonspecific lexical access, whereas their presence partially reduces parallel language activation. We conclude that language coactivation in bilinguals is highly modulated by sublexical processing and that orthographic regularities of the two languages of a bilingual are a determining factor in lexical access

The Role of Orthotactics in Language Switching: An ERP Investigation Using Masked Language Priming

It is commonly accepted that bilinguals access lexical representations from their two languages during language comprehension, even when they operate in a single language context. Language detection mechanisms are, thus, hypothesized to operate after the stage of lexical access during visual word recognition. However, recent studies showed reduced cross-language activation when sub-lexical properties of words are specific to one of the bilingual’s two languages, hinting at the fact that language selection may start before the stage of lexical access. Here, we tested highly fluent Spanish–Basque and Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked language priming paradigm in which first language (L1) target words are primed by unconsciously perceived L1 or second language (L2) words. Critically, L2 primes were either orthotactically legal or illegal in L1. Results showed automatic language detection effects only for orthotactically marked L2 primes and within the timeframe of the N250, an index of sub-lexical-to-lexical integration. Marked L2 primes also affected the processing of L1 targets at the stage of conceptual processing, but only in bilinguals whose languages are transparent. We conclude that automatic and unconscious language detection mechanisms can operate at sub-lexical levels of processing. In the absence of sub-lexical language cues, unconsciously perceived primes in the irrelevant language might not automatically trigger post-lexical language identification, thereby resulting in the lack of observable language switching effects

How do bilinguals identify the language of the words they read?

How do bilinguals detect the language of the words they read? Recent electrophysiological research using the masked priming paradigm combining primes and targets from different languages has shown that bilingual readers identify the language of the words within approximately 200 ms. Recent evidence shows that language-detection mechanisms vary as a function of the orthographic markedness of the words (i.e., whether or not a given word contains graphemic combinations that are not legal in the other language). The present study examined how the sub-lexical orthographic regularities of words are used as predictive cues. Spanish–Basque bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals (control group) were tested in an Event-Related Potential (ERP) experiment, using the masked priming paradigm. During the experiment, Spanish targets were briefly preceded by unrelated Spanish or Basque words. Unrelated Basque words could contain bigram combinations that are either plausible or implausible in the target language (Spanish). Results show a language switch effect in the N250 and N400 components for marked Basque primes in both groups, whereas, in the case of unmarked Basque primes, language switch effects were found in bilinguals but not monolinguals. These data demonstrate that statistical orthographic regularities of words play an important role in bilingual language detection, and provide new evidence supporting the assumptions of the BIA+ extended model

The Whorfian Brain:Neuroscientific Approaches to Linguistic Relativity

Modern approaches to the Whorfian linguistic relativity question have reframed it from one of whether language shapes our thinking or not, to one that tries to understand the factors that contribute to the extent and nature of any observable influence of language on perception. The current paper demonstrates that such understanding is significantly enhanced by moving the evidentiary basis toward a more biologically grounded empirical arena. We review recent neuroscientific evidence using a variety of methodological techniques that reveal the functional organisation and temporal distribution of the ubiquitous relationship between language and cognitive processing in the human brain

Back to the future? How Chinese-English bilinguals switch between front and back orientation for time

The ability to conceive time is a corner stone of human cognition. It is unknown, however, whether time conceptualisation differs depending on language of operation in bilinguals. Whilst both Chinese and English cultures associate the future with the front space, some temporal expressions of Chinese involve a configuration reversal due to historic reasons. For instance, Chinese refers to the day after tomorrow using the spatiotemporal metaphor hou-tian – ‘back-day’ and to the day before yesterday using qian-tian – ‘front-day’. Here, we show that native metaphors interfere with time conceptualisation when bilinguals operate in the second language. We asked Chinese-English bilinguals to indicate whether an auditory stimulus depicted a day of the week either one or two days away from the present day, irrespective of whether it referred to the past or the future, and ignoring whether it was presented through loudspeakers situated in the back or the front space. Stimulus configurations incongruent with spatiotemporal metaphors of Chinese (e.g., “Friday” presented in the front of the participant during a session held on a Wednesday) were conceptually more challenging than congruent configurations (e.g., the same stimulus presented in their back), as indexed by N400 modulations of event-related brain potentials. The same pattern obtained for days or years as stimuli, but surprisingly, it was found only when participants operated in English, not in Chinese. We contend that the task was easier and less prone to induce cross-language activation when conducted in the native language. We thus show that, when they operate in the second language, bilinguals unconsciously retrieve irrelevant native language representations that shape time conceptualisation in real time

Developmental changes associated with cross-language similarity in bilingual children

The main goal of the present study was to investigate how the degree of orthographic overlap between translation equivalents influences bilingual word recognition processes at different stages of reading development. Spanish–Basque bilingual children with ages ranging from 8 to 15 years were tested in an explicit translation recognition task with a large set of items. Critically, the degree of cross-language similarity (i.e. the cognate status) between the references and the correct targets was manipulated along a continuum in order to investigate how the reliance on cross-language orthographic overlap varies as a function of reading experience. Results showed that younger children were significantly more sensitive to the cognate status of words than older children while recognising translation equivalents, and that this difference did not depend on the speed of response of the participants. These results demonstrate that the influence of cross-language similarity progressively diminishes as a function of increased exposure to print together with the maturation of the mechanisms responsible for language interference suppression, as suggested by developmental models of bilingual lexical access

Does learning a language in the elderly enhance switching ability?

The bilingual advantage has been subject of research repeatedly over the last decade. Many studies have supported the idea of the existence of a higher functioning in domain general cognitive abilities among bilingual samples as compared to monolingual samples. However, this idea has been recently challenged by a number of scholars, and a recent body of evidence suggests that the acquisition of a new language does not necessarily involve an enhancement of domain-general non-linguistic abilities. In the current study we aimed at exploring the relationship between language learning and switching ability in elderly monolingual participants who learned a second language during a whole academic year. A colour-shape switching task was used as a measure of switching ability and was administered twice in a pre-test/post-test design, both to the critical group of seniors attending a language-learning course on a regular basis and to a group of age-matched monolingual seniors who did not attend to any language-learning course and that served as controls. Results showed that switching costs in the post-test were not significantly different from those in the pre-test in either the experimental or the control groups, demonstrating that the acquisition of a second language in the elderly does not necessarily lead to an enhancement of switching ability as measured by switching costs. We acknowledge the need of further longitudinal L2 training studies to reach clear conclusions on the effects of language learning in domain-general executive control

Does training with amplitude modulated tones affect tone-vocoded speech perception?

Temporal-envelope cues are essential for successful speech perception. We asked here whether training on stimuli containing temporal-envelope cues without speech content can improve the perception of spectrally-degraded (vocoded) speech in which the temporal-envelope (but not the temporal fine structure) is mainly preserved. Two groups of listeners were trained on different amplitude-modulation (AM) based tasks, either AM detection or AM-rate discrimination (21 blocks of 60 trials during two days, 1260 trials; frequency range: 4Hz, 8Hz, and 16Hz), while an additional control group did not undertake any training. Consonant identification in vocoded vowel-consonant-vowel stimuli was tested before and after training on the AM tasks (or at an equivalent time interval for the control group). Following training, only the trained groups showed a significant improvement in the perception of vocoded speech, but the improvement did not significantly differ from that observed for controls. Thus, we do not find convincing evidence that this amount of training with temporal-envelope cues without speech content provide significant benefit for vocoded speech intelligibility. Alternative training regimens using vocoded speech along the linguistic hierarchy should be explored

Electrophysiological Evidence for a Whorfian Double Dissociation of Categorical Perception Across Two Languages : Categorical Perception Within and Across Languages

Taza in Spanish refers to cups and mugs in English, whereas glass refers to different glass types in Spanish: copa and vaso. It is still unclear whether such categorical distinctions induce early perceptual differences in speakers of different languages. In this study, for the first time, we report symmetrical effects of terminology on preattentive indices of categorical perception across languages. Native speakers of English or Spanish saw arrays of cups, mugs, copas, and vasos flashed in streams. Visual mismatch negativity, an implicit electrophysiological correlate of perceptual change in the peripheral visual field, was modulated for categorical contrasts marked in the participants’ native language but not for objects designated by the same label. Conversely, P3a, an index of attentional orienting, was modulated only for missing contrasts in the participants’ native language. Thus, whereas native labels influenced participants’ preattentive perceptual encoding of objects, nonverbally encoded dissociations reoriented their attention at a later processing stage

Flexing gender perception:Brain potentials reveal the cognitive permeability of grammatical information

A growing body of recent research suggests that verbal categories, particularly labels, impact categorization and perception. These findings are commonly interpreted as demonstrating the involvement of language on cognition, however, whether these assumptions hold true for grammatical structures has yet to be investigated. In the present study, we investigated the extent to which linguistic information, namely, grammatical gender categories structures cognition to subsequently influence categorical judgments and perception. In a non-verbal categorization task, French-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers made gender-associated judgments about a set of image pairs while event-related potentials were recorded. The image sets were composed of an object paired with either a female or male face, wherein the object was manipulated for their conceptual gender relatedness and grammatical gender congruency to the sex of the following target face. The results showed that grammatical gender modulated the N1 and P2/VPP, as well as the N300 exclusively for the French-English bilinguals, indicating the inclusion of language in the mechanisms associated with attentional bias and categorization. In contrast, conceptual gender information impacted the monolingual English speakers in the later N300 time window given the absence of a comparable grammatical feature. Such effects of grammatical categories in the early perceptual stream have not been found before, and further provide grounds to suggest that language shapes perception