Bi/Multi-lingualism
Friday, September 30th, 2011 [17:20 - 19:20]
PS_1.115 - The effect of L1 syntax on the agreement of L2 possessive structures
Foucart, A. 1 , Santesteban, M. 2 , Branigan, H. 1 & Pickering, M. 1
1 Dept of Psychology. The University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, UK.
2 Dept. of Linguistics and Basque Studies. University of the Basque Country. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
Some studies have suggested an effect of L1 syntax on L2 agreement processing (Foucart & Frenck-Mestre,2011; Tockowitz & MacWhinney,2005). Previously, we showed that L1 syntactic rules affect the production of possessive structures (Foucart et al., 2010). Here we investigated whether such influence also occurs in comprehension. In a reading task involving possessives, we contrasted the performance of 18 English native speakers with that of two groups of 18 advanced late bilinguals with similar (Greek-English: possessives agree with the possessor) or different (Spanish-English: possessives agree with the possessee) agreement rules. In an eye-tracking experiment, participants read sentences in which the gender congruence of possessives and the gender matching between the possessor and the possessee were manipulated (e.g., Yesterday the witch kissed her/his daughter/son and left quietly). Preliminary results showed longer reading times for native speakers when the gender of the possessor and the adjective/pronoun conflicted. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between group and congruence for the native speakers and the Spanish-English bilinguals. In contrast, no interaction was found between the native speakers and the Greek-English bilinguals. These results suggest that L2 agreement may be affected by the L1 syntactic rules, at least in the case of possessive structures.
PS_1.116 - Is language-switching an instance of domain-general task switching? Evidence from Event Related Potentials
Branzi, F. M. . 1 , FitzPatrick, I. 1 , Abutalebi, J. 2 & Costa, A. 1, 3
1 Departament de Tecnologies de la Informació i les Comunicacions, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
2 Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milan, Italy
3 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain
Although Bilingual language control is commonly considered to be subsidiary to the domain-general executive control functioning, there are few experimental studies that directly investigate whether this is the case. One way to do so is to compare participants’ performances on a task that involves a switch between two languages with performances on a non-linguistic task that requires a switch between two task-sets. A differential pattern of switch costs between the tasks might be taken to reflect the recruitment of control processes specific to bilingual language control. We tested bilingual speakers while they performed a picture naming and a size decision task, both organised in three blocks (e.g., NameL1-NameL2-NameL1; or Bigger-Smaller-Bigger than a shoebox). The crucial comparison was between the first and the third block (in which participants had to return to the initial language or task set). In the linguistic task, returning to the initial language induced a cognitive cost (more positive ERP components and slower RTs) whereas, in the non-linguistic task, recovering a previously performed task produced a facilitation effect. The differential ERP and RT patterns between the two tasks suggest that bilingual language control should not be considered as an instance of domain-general executive control.
PS_1.117 - The role of lexical selection and speech production in language switching
Philipp, A. M. & Koch, I.
Department of Psychology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
When people switch between languages, language-switch costs occur. Empirically, language-switch costs are measured as the performance difference between switch trials, in which an object has to be named in a different language as the object in the previous trial, and repeat trials, in which the same language is relevant in two successive trials. In the present experiment, participants had to name digits in either German (L1) or English (L2). As an additional manipulation, a go/no-go paradigm was used. That is, 25% of all trials were no-go trials, in which no verbal response was requested. We observed substantial switch costs in go trials following go trials but not in go trials following no-go trials. Even when the no-go signal was presented 1500 ms after the digit and the language cue, so that participants were able to engage in lexical selection (i.e. select the correct word in the correct language), we observed no language-switch costs. This finding indicates that late, response-related processes, presumably phonological encoding, speech production, and/or articulation, play a crucial role for the occurrence of language-switch costs.
PS_1.118 - An ERPs Study of Code Switching effect in Chinese-English Bilinguals
Lin, C. & Tzeng, A. K.
the Department of Psychology in Chung Yuan Christian University
Two ERPs experiments were conducted to investigate code switching effect in Mandarin-English bilinguals. Stimuli were sentences presented in Mandarin (Experiment 1) or English (experiment 2). The last words in the sentences were the target. There were three types of targets: the expected words, synonyms (Lexical Switching, LS) and translations (Code Switching, CS). Participants were right-handed Mandarin-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, N400 (400 - 500 ms) were significantly larger in CS condition than in Control and LS conditions. Experiment 2 showed the same effect in English. The comparison of CS between two experiments suggested that switching from L1 to L2 (experiment 1) elicited a larger N400 than from L2 to L1 (experiment 2). The comparison among three conditions showed only CS condition elicited a positivity before N400 (between 300 and 400 ms). We hypothesized this was a P300 due to the change of languages.
PS_1.119 - Effects of bilingualism in inhibitory control and context processing
Morales, J. 1 , Bajo, M. T. 1 & Gómez-Ariza, C. J. 2
1 University of Granada
2 University of Jaén
There is growing evidence showing that executive functioning benefits from bilingual experience, specifically on tasks engaging conflict resolution (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2004; Costa et al., 2008, 2009; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008). Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus regarding the nature of the mechanisms underlying this bilingual advantage. In our experiments, we explored bilinguals’ performance in tasks involving different executive functions. We compared the inhibitory control and goal maintenance skills of young monolinguals and young early bilinguals in tasks which involve overriding competing responses, context processing, and continuous performance. Contrary to our predictions, we did not find higher inhibitory capacity for our bilinguals. However, our results showed that bilinguals made less mistakes prompted by misleading context information in a continuous performance task. These findings suggest that bilingual experience may lead to higher ability to focus on the goals of the task. Therefore, the better performance in conflict resolution tasks observed in previous studies might be mediated by goal maintenance and not strictly due to inhibitory control.
PS_1.120 - Stress assignment in bilingual adults reading Italian as a second language: The effect of vocabulary size
Burani, C. 1 , Primativo, S. 1, 2 , Arduino, L. S. 1, 3 , O'Brien, S. 1 , Paizi, D. 1 & Rinaldi, P. 1
1 Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
2 University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy
3 LUMSA University, Rome, Italy
Italian has a transparent orthography, with regular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences. However, stress assignment to three-syllable words is not governed by rule but requires lexical-lookup. Mainly, in Italian there are two stress patterns and one is more frequent (dominant) than the other (non-dominant). Both word frequency and reader’s lexical knowledge are expected to affect correct stress assignment. Two groups of English-Italian bilingual adults, matched for age, gender and education but differing for age of arrival and years spent in Italy, were matched to one group of Italian readers. The groups of bilinguals differed for vocabulary size, as evaluated by semantic fluency and lexical decision. All groups read aloud three-syllabic words differing for frequency (high and low) and stress pattern (dominant and non-dominant). Both naming latencies and pronunciation accuracy were affected by vocabulary size, with main differences on low-frequency words. In assigning stress, vocabulary size interacted with word frequency and stress dominance. Both groups of bilingual readers made more errors of stress assignment on low-frequency words with non-dominant stress, than native Italian readers. Bilingual readers with a smaller vocabulary made more stress assignment errors than bilinguals with a larger vocabulary. The results confirm the role of lexical knowledge in reading Italian aloud.