First and Second-language Phonological Representations in the Mental Lexicon (original) (raw)
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Neuropsychologia, 2012
We investigated the behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) of bilingual word recognition to three fundamental psycholinguistic factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality, in early bilinguals vs. monolinguals. Earlier behavioral studies have reported larger frequency effects in bilinguals' nondominant vs. dominant language and in some studies also when compared to corresponding monolinguals. In ERPs, language processing differences between bilinguals vs. monolinguals have typically been found in the N400 component. In the present study, highly proficient Finnish-Swedish bilinguals who had acquired both languages during childhood were compared to Finnish monolinguals during a visual lexical decision task and simultaneous ERP recordings. Behaviorally, we found that the response latencies were overall longer in bilinguals than monolinguals, and that the effects for all three factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality were also larger in bilinguals even though they had acquired both languages early and were highly proficient in them. In line with this, the N400 effects induced by frequency, morphology, and lexicality were larger for bilinguals than monolinguals. Furthermore, the ERP results also suggest that while most inflected Finnish words are decomposed into stem and suffix, only monolinguals have encountered high frequency inflected word forms often enough to develop full-form representations for them. Larger behavioral and neural effects in bilinguals in these factors likely reflect lower amount of exposure to words compared to monolinguals, as the language input of bilinguals is divided between two languages.
Electrophysiological Measures of Language Processing in Bilinguals
& The aim of the present study was to investigate how multiple languages are represented in the human brain. Eventrelated brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from righthanded polyglots and monolinguals during a task involving silent reading. The participants in the experiment were nine Italian monolinguals and nine Italian/Slovenian bilinguals of a Slovenian minority in Trieste; the bilinguals, highly fluent in both languages, had spoken both languages since birth. The stimuli were terminal words that would correctly complete a short, meaningful, previously shown sentence, or else were semantically or syntactically incorrect. The task consisted in deciding whether the sentences were well formed or not, giving the response by pressing a button. Both groups read the same set of 200 Italian sentences to compare the linguistic processing, while the bilinguals also received a set of 200 Slovenian sentences, comparable in complexity and length, to compare the processing of the two languages within the group. For the bilinguals, the ERP results revealed a strong, left-sided activation, reflected by the N1 component, of the occipitotemporal regions dedicated to orthographic processing, with a latency of about 150 msec for Slovenian words, but bilateral activation of the same areas for Italian words, which was also displayed by topographical mapping. In monolinguals, semantic error produced a long-lasting negative response (N2 and N4) that was greater over the right hemisphere, whereas syntactic error activated mostly the left hemisphere. Conversely, in the bilinguals, semantic incongruence resulted in greater response over the left hemisphere than over the right. In this group, the P615 syntactical error responses were of equal amplitude on both hemispheres for Italian words and greater on the right side for Slovenian words.
Executive control in bilingual language processing. Language Learning
Although the age of acquisition of a language has an effect when learning a second language, the similarity between languages may also have a crucial role. The aim of the present study is to understand the influence of this latter factor in the acquisition of morphosyntactic information. With this purpose, two groups of highly proficient early Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were presented with a repetition-priming paradigm with regular andirregular verbs of Spanish. Catalan and Spanish have a similar suffix (-o) for regular verbs and completely different alternations for irregular verbs. Two types of irregular verbs were studied (semi-regular verbs with a systematic diphthong alternation, sentir-siento, and verbs with idiosyncratic changes, venir-vengo). Regular verbs showed the same centro-parietal N400 priming effect in the second-language speakers (L2) as in primary-language (L1) speakers. However, differences between groups, in the ERP pattern and the topography of the N400 effect, were observed for irregularmorphology. In L1 speakers, the N400 effect was attenuated only for semi-regular verbs. In contrast, L2 speakers showed a reduced N400 priming effect in both irregular contrasts. This pattern of results suggests that the similarity between languages may help for similar structures but may interfere for dissimilar structures, at least when the two languages have very similar morphological systems.
Neural circuitry of the bilingual mental lexicon: Effect of age of second language acquisition
Brain and Cognition, 2010
Numerous studies have proposed that changes of the human language faculty caused by neural maturation can explain the substantial differences in ultimate attainment of grammatical competences between first language (L1) acquirers and second language (L2) learners. However, little evidence on the effect of neural maturation on the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is available. The present functional magnetic resonance study addresses this question via a cross-linguistic neural adaptation paradigm. Age of acquisition (AoA) of L2 was systematically manipulated. Concrete nouns were repeated across language (e.g., French-German, valise suitcase -Koffer suitcase ). Whereas early bilinguals (AoA of L2 < 3 years) showed larger repetition enhancement (RE) effects in the left superior temporal gyrus, the bilateral superior frontal gyrus and the right posterior insula, late bilinguals (AoA of L2 > 10 years) showed larger RE effects in the middle portion of the left insula and in the right middle frontal gyrus (MFG). We suggest that, as for grammatical knowledge, the attainment of lexical knowledge in L2 is affected by neural maturation. The present findings lend support to neurocognitive models of bilingual word recognition postulating that, for both early and late bilinguals, the two languages are interconnected at the conceptual level.
2012
The aim of this study was to determine whether the type of bilingualism affects neural organisation. We performed identification experiments and mismatch negativity (MMN) registrations in Finnish and Swedish language settings to see, whether behavioural identification and neurophysiological discrimination of vowels depend on the linguistic context, and whether there is a difference between two kinds of bilinguals. The stimuli were two vowels, which differentiate meaning in Finnish, but not in Swedish. The results indicate that Balanced Bilinguals are inconsistent in identification performance, and they have a longer MMN latency. Moreover, their MMN amplitude is context-independent, while Dominant Bilinguals show a larger MMN in the Finnish context. These results indicate that Dominant Bilinguals inhibit the preattentive discrimination of native contrast in a context where the distinction is non-phonemic, but this is not possible for Balanced Bilinguals. This implies that Dominant Bilinguals have separate systems, while Balanced Bilinguals have one inseparable system.
Brain potentials predict language selection before speech onset in bilinguals
Studies of language production in bilinguals have seldom considered the fact that language selection likely involves proactive control. Here, we show that Chinese-English bilinguals actively inhibit the language not-to-be used before the onset of a picture to be named. Depending on the nature of a directive cue, participants named a subsequent picture in their native language, in their second language, or remained silent. The cue elicited a contingent negative variation of event-related brain potentials, greater in amplitude when the cue announced a naming trial as compared to when it announced a silent trial. In addition, the negativity was greater in amplitude when the picture was to be named in English than in Chinese, suggesting that preparation for speech in the second language requires more inhibition than preparation for speech in the native language. This result is the first direct neurophysiological evidence consistent with proactive inhibitory control in bilingual production.
Journal of Neurolinguistics, 2016
Language switching is common in bilingual processing, and it has been repeatedly shown to induce processing costs. However, only a handful of studies have examined such costs at the sentence level, with a limited few among them having incorporated factors extensively studied in monolingual sentence processing, such as semantic expectedness. Using the event related potentials (ERP) technique, this study aimed at exploring whether switching costs were modulated by (1) switching directions, when switching happens between languages of different dominance, and by (2) semantic expectedness, as indicated by cloze probability. Twenty-two Mandarin-Taiwanese early bilinguals, with Mandarin being their dominant and Taiwanese their non-dominant language, participated in the study. They were instructed to listen to the stimuli attentively and to perform a word memory recognition task in 20% of the trials. The results showed that switching induced an LPC effect, suggesting that switched elements were harder to be integrated. More importantly, switching from the dominant to the non-dominant language demanded extra effort than switching in the other direction, as reflected by the PMN (detection of an unexpected sound), the N400 (indication of lexical access difficulty) and the frontal negativity (inhibition of the pre-activated representations), revealing that the dominant language provides better prediction of the upcoming word. Also, cloze probability interacted with switching, but only at an early stage, suggesting that semantic expectedness did not enduringly modulate the switching cost. Our results generally supported predictions from the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model (BIAþ model, Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), showing that language use and sentence context can affect lexical processing in bilinguals.
Automaticity of speech processing in early bilingual adults and children
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 2019
We examine whether early acquisition of a second language (L2) leads to native-like neural processing of phonemic contrasts that are absent in the L1. Four groups (adult and child monolingual speakers of English; adult and child early bilingual speakers of English and Spanish, exposed to both languages before 5 years of age) participated in a study comparing the English /ɪ/ - /ε/ contrast. Neural measures of automatic change detection (Mismatch Negativity, MMN) and attention (Processing Negativity, PN and Late Negativity, LN) were measured by varying whether participants tracked the stimulus stream or not. We observed no effect of bilingualism on the MMN, but adult bilinguals differed significantly from adult monolinguals on neural indices of attention. The child bilinguals were indistinguishable from their monolingual peers. This suggest that learning a L2 before five years of age leads to native-like phoneme discrimination, but bilinguals develop increased attentional sensitivity ...
Neuropsychologia, 2021
Second language (L2) learners frequently encounter persistent difficulty in perceiving certain non-native sound contrasts, i.e., a phenomenon called "phonological deafness". However, if extensive L2 experience leads to neuroplastic changes in the phonological system, then the capacity to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts should progressively improve. Such perceptual changes should be attested by modifications at the neurophysiological level. We designed an EEG experiment in which the listeners' perceptual capacities to discriminate second language phonemic contrasts influence the processing of lexical-semantic violations. Semantic congruency of critical words in a sentence context was driven by a phonemic contrast that was unique to the L2, English (e.g.,/ɪ/-/i:/, shipsheep). Twenty-eight young adult native speakers of French with intermediate proficiency in English listened to sentences that contained either a semantically congruent or incongruent critical word (e.g., The anchor of the ship/*sheep was let down) while EEG was recorded. Three ERP effects were found to relate to increasing L2 proficiency: (1) a left frontal auditory N100 effect, (2) a smaller fronto-central phonological mismatch negativity (PMN) effect and (3) a semantic N400 effect. No effect of proficiency was found on oscillatory markers. The current findings suggest that neuronal plasticity in the human brain allows for the late acquisition of even hard-wired linguistic features such as the discrimination of phonemic contrasts in a second language. This is the first time that behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for the critical role of neural plasticity underlying L2 phonological processing and its interdependence with semantic processing has been provided. Our data strongly support the idea that pieces of information from different levels of linguistic processing (e.g., phonological, semantic) strongly interact and influence each other during online language processing.