How iconic are Chinese characters?

The study explores the notion that some Chinese characters contain pictorial indications of meanings that can be used to help retrieve the referent. Thirty adults with no prior knowledge of Chinese guessed the meanings of twenty Chinese characters by choosing between one of two photographs. Half of the characters were considered to be iconic and the other half was considered to be arbitrary. The proportion of correct guesses for iconic characters was high, but the proportion for arbitrary characters was at chance. These results show a distinction between characters based on the extent to which they have retained aspects of iconicity in reference to their concepts that can direct the reader to their meaning. The results have implications for using pictures to promote the understanding of the orthographic–semantic process in simple Chinese characters

Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults

English receptive vocabulary scores from 797 monolingual and 808 bilingual participants between the ages of 17 and 89 years old were aggregated from 20 studies to compare standard scores across language groups. The distribution of scores was unimodal for both groups but the mean score was significantly different, with monolinguals obtaining higher standard scores than bilinguals. Consistent with previous research, older adults had higher vocabulary scores than younger adults. The results are discussed in terms of the implications for theoretical conceptions of linguistic processing and clinical diagnosis in bilingual populations

Bilingualism is not a categorical variable: Interaction between language proficiency and usage

Bilingual experience is dynamic and poses a challenge for researchers to develop instruments that capture its relevant dimensions. The present study examined responses from a questionnaire administered to 110 heterogeneous bilingual young adults. These questions concern participants’ language use, acquisition history and self-reported proficiency. The questionnaire responses and performances on standardized English proficiency measures were analyzed using factor analysis. In order to retain a realistic representation of bilingual experience, the factors were allowed to correlate with each other in the analysis. Two correlating factors were extracted, representing daily bilingual usage and English proficiency. These two factors were also related to self-rated proficiency in English and non-English language. Results were interpreted as supporting the notion that bilingual experience is composed of multiple related dimensions that will need to be considered in assessments of the consequences of bilingualism

The universality of symbolic representation for reading in Asian and alphabetic languages

Neuroimaging studies of reading have identified unique patterns of activation for individuals reading in alphabetic and Asian languages, suggesting the involvement of different processes in each. The present study investigates the extent to which a cognitive prerequisite for reading, the understanding of the symbolic function of print, is common to children learning to read in these two different systems. Four-year-old children in Hong Kong learning to read in Cantonese and children in Canada learning to read in English are compared for their understanding of this concept by means of the moving word task. Children in both settings performed the same on the task, indicating similar levels of progress in spite of experience with very different writing systems. In addition, the children in Hong Kong benefited from the structural similarity between certain iconic characters and their referents, making these items easier than arbitrary characters. These results point to an important cognitive universal in the development of literacy for all children that is the foundation for skilled reading that later becomes diverse and specialized

Common and distinct cognitive bases for reading in English–Cantonese bilinguals

The study explores the relationship between phonological awareness and early reading for bilingual children learning to read in two languages that use different writing systems. Participants were 57 Cantonese–English bilingual 6-year-olds who were learning to read in both languages. The children completed cognitive measures, phonological awareness tasks, and word identification tests in both languages. Once cognitive abilities had been controlled, there was no correlation in word identification ability performance across languages, but the correspondence in phonological awareness measures remained strong. This pattern was confirmed by a principal components analysis and hierarchical regression that demonstrated a different role for each phonological awareness factor in reading performance in each language. The results indicate that phonological awareness depends on a set of cognitive abilities that is applied generally across languages and that early reading depends on a common set of cognitive abilities in conjunction with skills specific to different writing systems

Executive control in bilinguals: a concise review on fMRI studies

The investigation of bilingualism and cognition has been enriched by recent developments in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Extending how bilingual experience shapes cognition, this review examines recent fMRI studies adopting executive control tasks with minimal or no linguistic demands. Across a range of studies with divergent ages and language pairs spoken by bilinguals, brain regions supporting executive control significantly overlap with brain regions recruited for language control (Abutalebi & Green, this issue). Furthermore, limited but emerging studies on resting-state networks are addressed, which suggest more coherent spatially distributed functional connectivity in bilinguals. Given the dynamic nature of bilingual experience, it is essential to consider both task-related functional networks (externally-driven engagement), and resting-state networks, such as default mode network (internal control). Both types of networks are important elements of bilingual language control, which relies on domain-general executive control

Experience-based individual differences modulate language, mind and brain outcomes in multilinguals

Being able to speak and/or understand multiple languages is a ubiquitous human behavior. Over the past decades in particular, an increasing amount of research has investigated the acquisition, processing, and use of multiple languages as well as how variation therein associates with differential cognitive performance, brain functions and structures (see Bialystok, 2016, Bialystok, 2017, De Houwer, 2021, Fricke et al., 2019, Grundy and Timmer, 2017, Kroll and Bialystok, 2013, Li and Dong, 2020, Sulpizio et al., 2020 for reviews). Taken together, this research strongly suggests that these behavioral and neural consequences reflect individual differences in how one adapts to her environment through multilingualism. Paying homage to the reality of language diversities around the world, we have opted to use herein the term multilingualism, as opposed to simply bilingualism, given that linguistic experiences can, and often do, extend beyond managing only two languages on a daily basis. The present special issue presents a collection of 15 papers examining the linguistic, cognitive and neural consequences of multilingualism, using innovative approaches to characterize relevant experiences

Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control?

Young English-speaking monolingual and bilingual adults were examined for English proficiency, language use history, and performance on a flanker task. The bilinguals, who were about twenty years old, were divided into two groups (early bilinguals and late bilinguals) according to whether they became actively bilingual before or after the age of ten years. Early bilinguals and monolinguals demonstrated similar levels of English proficiency, and both groups were more proficient in English than late bilinguals. In contrast, early bilinguals produced the smallest response time cost for incongruent trials (flanker effect) with no difference between monolinguals and late bilinguals. Moreover, across the whole sample of bilinguals, onset age of active bilingualism was negatively correlated with English proficiency and positively correlated with the flanker effect. These results suggest a gradient in which more experience in being actively bilingual is associated with greater advantages in cognitive control and higher language proficiency