Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Effects in Late Spanish/English Bilinguals

Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco ‘The detective is looking for his bench’) in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso ‘bench-glass’, representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo ‘game-egg’, representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers

From the Field to the Lab: A Converging Methods Approach to the Study of Codeswitching

Variation in the ways by which an individual processes codeswitched language may reveal fundamental dynamics of the language system that are otherwise obscured under unilingual conditions. Despite this, an important aspect that has been largely neglected in the field is the role of the bilingual experience in language processing. Drawing on corpus-driven and experimental research, the corpus-to-cognition approach to codeswitching integrates field- and laboratory-based work to examine how the bilingual experience may influence language processing. In this review, we elaborate on the best practices for investigating codeswitching, with converging evidence from different methodologies across different bilingual populations

Linking frequency to bilingual switch costs during real-time sentence comprehension

Bilinguals experience processing costs when comprehending code-switches, yet the magnitude of the cost fluctuates depending on numerous factors. We tested whether switch costs vary based on the frequency of different types of code-switches, as estimated from natural corpora of bilingual speech and text. Spanish–English bilinguals in the U.S. read single-language and code-switched sentences in a self-paced task. Sentence regions containing code-switches were read more slowly than single-language control regions, consistent with the idea that integrating a code-switch poses a processing challenge. Crucially, more frequent code-switches elicited significantly smaller costs both within and across most classes of switch types (e.g., within verb phrases and when comparing switches at verb-phrase and noun-phrase sites). The results suggest that, in addition to learning distributions of syntactic and semantic patterns, bilinguals develop finely tuned expectations about code-switching behavior – representing one reason why code-switching in naturalistic contexts may not be particularly costly.https://doi.org/10.1017/S136672892300036

The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian–Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’) and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects’ name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed