The bilingual native speaker competence: evidence from explicit and implicit language knowledge using elicited production, sentence-picture matching, and pupillometry

The present pilot study investigated potential effects of early and late child bilingualism in highly proficient adult bilinguals. It has been shown that some early second language (eL2) speakers stagnate when it comes to complex linguistic phenomena and that they display subtle difficulties in adulthood. Therefore, we have chosen the complex structure of double object constructions. We investigate the long-term achievement in a combined-method approach using elicited production, explicit comprehension by sentence-picture matching and a measure of implicit linguistic knowledge, namely pupillometry. This eye tracking method is suitable for measuring implicit reactions of the pupils to unexpected or ungrammatical stimuli. For production, ditransitive structures were elicited by means of a game. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was conducted. Two pictures were shown on a monitor that were equal with respect to the involved objects, but the thematic roles of direct and indirect objects were interchanged. Items were controlled for length, gender, animacy, semantic likelihood and word order. Reaction times and accuracy scores were analyzed. To this end, N = 18 bilingual adult speakers of German (+ another language, mean age: 26.5) with different ages of onset participated in this study and were compared to N = 26 monolingual German adult speakers (mean age 23.9). All participants had a proficiency of German above 89% correct in placement and cloze tests. Results show fully comparable productive and comprehensive competencies in monolinguals and bilinguals including the reaction times in the sentence-picture matching task and a word order effect on the reaction times in both groups. In the pupillometry task, we found monolinguals and bilinguals to be sensitive to differing conditions with respect to grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. However, we find between group differences in pupil dilations in that bilinguals react differently to strong grammatical violations than monolinguals. These results are discussed with respect to the term of native speaker competence and the variation within both groups

Problem Solving as an Encoding Task: A Special Case of the Generation Effect

Recent evidence suggests that solving problems through insight can enhance long-term memory for the problem and its solution. Previous findings have shown that generation of the solution as well as experiencing a feeling of Aha! can have a beneficial relationship to later memory. These findings lead to the question of how learning in problem-solving tasks in which a novel solution needs to be generated—such as in tasks used to study insight—differs from the classical generation effect. Because previous studies on learning from insight on one hand and the generation effect on the other hand have measured different types of memory, the present study examined two kinds of memory measures: indirect (solving old and new problems at test) and direct (recognition memory). At encoding, we manipulated whether participants had the chance to solve Compound Remote Associates Task items and compared later memory for generated solutions (generate condition) to solutions that were presented after failing to generate one (fail-to-generate condition), and to solutions that were presented without a chance at generation (read condition). Participants also reported if they had an Aha! experience for each problem. While both Aha! experiences and generated solutions were associated with more positive emotional responses, only the generation variable was associated with differences in later memory performance. While attempts to generate had an advantage over the read condition in recognition memory performance (generate \u3e fail-to-generate \u3e read), only when generation was successful did it enhance the solution rate of old items during testing (generate \u3e read \u3e fail-to-generate). Contrary to generation effects with other verbal stimuli, these results suggest that the generation effect in problem-solving tasks in which a novel solution needs to be found differs from the classical generation effect. Seeing a correct solution for a longer time (read) seems in the current case to be more helpful for solving the same problem later on, compared to being presented with the solution after a failed attempt at problem solving

Selective attention to stimulus representations in perception and memory: commonalities and differences

It has been proposed that the deployment of selective attention to perceptual and memory representations might be governed by similar cognitive processes and neural resources. However, evidence for this simple and appealing proposal remains inconclusive, which might be due to a considerable divergence in tasks and cognitive demands when comparing attentional selection in memory versus perception. To examine whether selection in both domains share common attentional processes and only differ in the stimuli they act upon (external vs. internal), we compared behavioral costs or benefits between selection domains. In both domains, participants had to attend a target stimulus from a set of simultaneously presented stimuli or simultaneously active memory representations, respectively, with set, target, or both, being repeated or changed across trials. The results of two experiments delineated principal similarities and differences of selection processes in both domains: While positive priming from stimulus repetition was found in both selection domains, we found no consistent effects of negative priming when shifting the focus of attention to a previously to-be-ignored stimulus. However, priming in the perception task was mainly due to repetitions of the target feature (here: color), whereas for the memory task, repetition of the same set of stimulus representations was most important. We propose that the differences can be attributed to a reduced cognitive effort when the now relevant memory representation had already been pre-activated (even as a distractor) in the previous trial. Additionally, our experiments both underscore the importance of taking stimulus–response associations into account, which may be a hidden factor behind differences between domains. We conclude that any attempt of comparing internal versus external attentional selection has to consider inherent differences in selection dynamics across representational domains

A Case for Reward-Based Episodic Encoding

Experiencing insight when solving problems can improve memory formation for both the problem and its solution. The underlying neural processes involved in this kind of learning are, however, thus far insufficiently understood. Here, we conceptualized insight as the sudden understanding of a novel relationship between known stimuli that fits into existing knowledge and is accompanied by a positive emotional response. Hence, insight is thought to comprise associative novelty, schema congruency, and intrinsic reward, all of which are separately known to enhance memory performance. We examined the neural correlates of learning from induced insight with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using our own version of the compound-remote-associates-task (CRAT) in which each item consists of three clue words and a solution word. (Pseudo-)Solution words were presented after a brief period of problem-solving attempts to induce either sudden comprehension (CRA items) or continued incomprehension (control items) at a specific time point. By comparing processing of the solution words of CRA with control items, we found induced insight to elicit activation of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex/medial prefrontal cortex (rACC/mPFC) and left hippocampus. This pattern of results lends support to the role of schema congruency (rACC/mPFC) and associative novelty (hippocampus) in the processing of induced insight. We propose that (1) the mPFC not only responds to schema-congruent information, but also to the detection of novel schemata, and (2) that the hippocampus responds to a form of associative novelty that is not just a novel constellation of familiar items, but rather comprises a novel meaningful relationship between the items—which was the only difference between our insight and no insight conditions. To investigate episodic long-term memory encoding, we compared CRA items whose solution word was recognized 24 h after encoding to those with forgotten solutions. We found activation in the left striatum and parts of the left amygdala, pointing to a potential role of brain reward circuitry in the encoding of the solution words. We propose that learning from induced insight mainly relies on the amygdala evaluating the internal value (as an affective evaluation) of the suddenly comprehended information, and striatum-dependent reward-based learning