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Phonetic variation in bilingual speech: A lens for studying the production–comprehension link
Abstract
We exploit the unique phonetic properties of bilingual speech to ask how processes occurring during planning affect speech articulation, and whether listeners can use the phonetic modulations that occur in anticipation of a codeswitch to help restrict their lexical search to the appropriate language. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual codeswitching in the Bangor Miami Corpus (Deuchar, Davies, Herring, Parafita Couto, & Carter, 2014) reveals that in anticipation of switching languages, Spanish–English bilinguals produce slowed speech rate and cross-language phonological influence on consonant voice onset time. A study of speech comprehension using the visual world paradigm demonstrates that bilingual listeners can indeed exploit these low-level phonetic cues to anticipate that a codeswitch is coming and to suppress activation of the non-target language. We discuss the implications of these results for current theories of bilingual language regulation, and situate them in terms of recent proposals relating the coupling of the production and comprehension systems more generally.
... Stimuli were recorded by a native Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilingual codeswitcher using a Shure SM35 head-worn condenser cardioid microphone and were normalized for intensity using Praat (Boersma and Weenink 2022). Language-mixed stimuli were not spliced, instead produced as-is by the speaker in order to avoid any unnatural-sounding artefacts that may influence comprehension, given that speakers have been shown to produce cues as to an upcoming switch in languages (e.g., Fricke et al. 2016). The speaker was instructed to produce the stimuli as she normally would were she speaking with another Spanish-English bilingual codeswitcher, with the caveat that the English elements should be produced with English-like qualities. ...
... Taken together, the results of the present study suggest that morphosyntactic integration is not the defining feature of LOLIs, at least with respect to online processing. Rather, there instead may be a complex interaction between various production strategies-e.g., the 'masculine default strategy', the phonetic realization of the other-language material (Fricke et al. 2016), and the relative frequencies of switches that occur at rather than after the determiner in noun/adjective language mixing-that produce a graded rather than absolute difference between the different types of language mixing explored in the present study. At least for comprehension, it does not appear that MWAs incur any additional processing demands as a result of "switching both lexicons and grammars" compared to LOLIs, as has been argued (e.g., Poplack and Dion 2012, p. 309). ...
... Nonetheless, there are some limitations in the present study that, if addressed, may lead to a more thorough understanding of the processing of MWAs and LOLIs. First, although Poplack and colleagues do not consider phonological integration a key component of 'nonce borrowings', previous literature has demonstrated that the phonetic characteristics of bilingual speech play a large role in shaping how it is processed (e.g., Fricke et al. 2016). The present study did not control for how the stimuli were produced by the speaker; as such, it is possible that the phonetic realization of the MWAs and LOLIs in the present study may have had an effect on how they were processed. ...
Prominent sociolinguistic theories of language mixing have posited that single-word insertions of one language into the other are the result of a distinct process than multi-word alternations between two languages given that the former overwhelmingly surface morphosyntactically integrated into the surrounding language. To date, this distinction has not been tested in comprehension. The present study makes use of pupillometry to examine the online processing of single-word insertions and multi-word alternations by highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals in Puerto Rico. Participants heard sentences containing target noun/adjective pairs (1) in unilingual Spanish, (2) where the Spanish noun was replaced with its English translation equivalent, followed by a Spanish post-nominal adjective, and (3) where both the noun and adjective appeared in English with the adjective occurring in the English pre-nominal position. Both types of language mixing elicit larger pupillary responses when compared to unilingual Spanish speech, though the magnitude of this difference depends on the grammatical gender of the target noun. Importantly, single-word insertions and multi-word alternations did not differ from one another. Taken together, these findings suggest that morphosyntactic integration is not the defining feature of single-word insertions, at least in comprehension, and that the comprehension system is tuned to the distributional properties of bilingual speech.
... Moreover, numerous sociolinguistic studies find that CS serves a variety of sociopragmatic purposes (Gumperz, 1982;Myers-Scotton, 1993). Recently, psycholinguists have investigated the neural and cognitive processes underpinning CS, focusing primarily on the processing costs of integration (e.g., Litcofsky & Van Hell, 2017;Olson, 2017) and attenuation of these costs under certain linguistic contexts (e.g., Fricke, Kroll & Dussias, 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo, Valdés Kroff & Dussias, 2016;Valdés Kroff, Dussias, Gerfen, Perrotti & Bajo, 2017). ...
... The onset of the code-switch was briefly delayed compared to the comparable Spanish-only point (mean difference = 22 ms). The delay was the product of natural pronunciation prolongation and corroborates experimental findings from Fricke, Kroll, and Dussias (2016). Using a Spanish-English bilingual corpus, the authors found that speech rate is reliably prolonged prior to code-switches, which in turn aids the processing of code-switches as demonstrated by an experimental study. ...
... Potentially, the slight natural prolongation (∼22 ms) prior to the CS mentioned in the Instructions and audio recordings section is responsible for or contributes to the CS effect on prediction. Previous studies demonstrate that the prolongations prior to code-switches aid their processing (Fricke et al., 2016) and artificially removing phonetic cues can interfere with CS processing (Shen et al., 2020). Therefore, we did not alter the natural pronunciation of the CS in our recordings. ...
Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.
... While laboratory studies of codeswitching typically entail manipulations of language imposed by instruction or cues in the materials and generally measure an aspect of production or of comprehension at the level of the word, some work shows a coordination between speaker and listener (e.g., Fricke, Kroll & Dussias, 2016). Importantly, preparation for an anticipated codeswitch can be detectable to the listener from the consequences of the articulatory behavior of the speaker even before the advent of the language switch defined by word choice. ...
... Importantly, preparation for an anticipated codeswitch can be detectable to the listener from the consequences of the articulatory behavior of the speaker even before the advent of the language switch defined by word choice. These results show that not only can bilingual speakers alter phonological aspects of their production prior to shifting lexical choices from one language to another, but bilingual listeners can exploit phonological or morphosyntactic cues of an upcoming codeswitch while comprehending another (Fricke et al., 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo, Valdés Kroff & Dussias, 2016;Shen, Gahl & Johnson, 2020;Valdés Kroff, Dussias, Gerfen, Perrotti & Bajo, 2017). The coordination across conversants and processes is impressive given the locus of a language switch may be distributed so that the phonological and lexical properties of the upcoming language switch do not necessarily arise concurrently. ...
... Aspects of individual speaker experience and the social context in which communication arises also influence the tendency to codeswitch (e.g., Beatty-Martínez, Navarro-Torres, Dussias, Bajo, Guzzardo Tamargo & Kroll, 2019;Declerck & Philipp, 2015;Fricke et al., 2016;Shen et al., 2020;Valdés Kroff et al., 2017). When preparing a response, bilinguals are sensitive to a host of less purely lexical factors such as the language proficiency of the other speaker (Kaan, Kheder, Kreidler, Tomić & Valdés Kroff, 2020;Kapiley & Mishra, 2019), the social context including the conventions for codeswitching in a particular community (Valdés Kroff et al., 2017) and aspects of status (Tenzer & Pudelko, 2015). ...
Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.
... Most studies in the auditory modality have examined sentence-level stimuli. These studies have demonstrated costs when bilinguals listen to an intrasentential language switch compared to when they listen to a single-language sentence (e.g., Adamou & Shen, 2019;Fricke et al., 2016;Liao & Chan, 2016;Olson, 2016a). However, most studies have also identified mitigating factors that can reduce costs. ...
... However, most studies have also identified mitigating factors that can reduce costs. Subtle cues that a code-switch is about to occur, such as reduced speech rate and changes in voice-onset time (Fricke et al., 2016) or differences in pitch contours (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014;Shen et al., 2020), may help listeners to anticipate that a code-switch is coming and therefore to process it more efficiently. When another language switch had already occurred earlier in the sentence, Olson (2016a) did not find costs in processing the second switch. ...
... However, for the code-switched sentences, this fast response strategy may not have given children sufficient opportunity to process and integrate the meaning of the code-switched segment with the rest of the sentence, resulting in more errors in answering the comprehension questions. In addition, the methodological decision to use spliced stimuli that removed subtle phonetic cues that could signal an upcoming codeswitch (e.g., Fricke et al., 2016;Piccinini & Garellek, 2014;Shen et al., 2020) could have made the code-switched sentences even more difficult to process in noise, even though effects were not seen on processing speed. Shen et al. (2020) did not see effects of using spliced stimuli on RTs, but eyetracking data did yield more subtle effects on lexical access in the switched language. ...
Purpose
The purpose of the current study was to examine the effects of code-switching on bilingual children's online processing and offline comprehension of sentences in the presence of noise. In addition, the study examined individual differences in language ability and cognitive control skills as moderators of children's ability to process code-switched sentences in noise.
Method
The participants were 50 Spanish–English bilingual children, ages 7;0–11;8 (years;months). Children completed an auditory moving window task to examine whether they processed sentences with code-switching more slowly and less accurately than single-language sentences in the presence of noise. They completed the Dimensional Change Card Sort task to index cognitive control and standardized language measures in English and Spanish to index relative language dominance and overall language ability.
Results
Children were significantly less accurate in answering offline comprehension questions about code-switched sentences presented in noise compared to single-language sentences, especially for their dominant language. They also tended to exhibit slower processing speed, but costs did not reach significance. Language ability had an overall effect on offline comprehension but did not moderate the effects of code-switching. Cognitive control moderated the extent to which offline comprehension costs were affected by language dominance.
Conclusions
The findings of the current study suggest that code-switching, especially in the presence of background noise, may place additional demands on children's ability to comprehend sentences. However, it may be the processing of the nondominant language, rather than code-switching per se, that is especially difficult in the presence of noise.
... Whereas past approaches conceptualized variation across samples and/or conditions as deviant or noisy phenomena, recent discoveries point to fundamental interactivity and plasticity in bilingual language learning and processing (Green and Kroll 2019). The emergence of this work has sparked a paradigm shift in the field, resulting in an upsurge of research on individual differences and of comparative studies that seek to exploit variability within and across languages and interactional contexts of language use (for reviews, see de Bruin 2019; Dussias et al. 2019;Fricke et al. 2016;Kroll et al. 2018;Titone and Tiv forthcoming). The changing landscape reflects increased recognition of the complexity of bilingualism as a life experience: bilingualism does not, in itself, result in a particular pattern of response; rather, it is a multidimensional construct that is shaped by individual and contextual factors (Baum and Titone 2014;DeLuca et al. 2020;Luk and Bialystok 2013;Zirnstein et al. 2019). ...
... A second source of evidence comes from research on language use in an L2-immersion context (for reviews see DeLuca et al. 2020;Fricke et al. 2016;Kroll et al. 2018;Kroll et al. 2021;Zirnstein et al. 2019). L2-immersion contexts provide a unique opportunity for examining the dynamic interplay between languages when bilinguals have restricted access to the L1. ...
Increasing evidence suggests that bilingualism does not, in itself, result in a particular pattern of response, revealing instead a complex and multidimensional construct that is shaped by evolutionary and ecological sources of variability. Despite growing recognition of the need for a richer characterization of bilingual speakers and of the different contexts of language use, we understand relatively little about the boundary conditions of putative "bilingualism" effects. Here, we review recent findings that demonstrate how variability in the language experiences of bilingual speakers, and also in the ability of bilingual speakers to adapt to the distinct demands of different interactional contexts, impact interactions between language use, language processing, and cognitive control processes generally. Given these findings, our position is that systematic variation in bilingual language experience gives rise to a variety of phenotypes that have different patterns of associations across language processing and cognitive outcomes. The goal of this paper is thus to illustrate how focusing on systematic variation through the identification of bilingual phenotypes can provide crucial insights into a variety of performance patterns, in a manner that has implications for previous and future research.
... Most prior work has focused on phonologically similar yet phonetically distinct sounds, as with the comparison between initial voiceless stops in English (long-lag) and Spanish (short-lag). Despite substantial phonetic differences, these sounds are clearly linked [8,9,10,11]. The studies cited here all examine initial voice-onset time (VOT) for bilinguals who speak English and a language with a different initial voicing contrast (e.g., Spanish) and demonstrate convergence in two ways. ...
... In both cases, evidence of crosslinguistic influence (CLI) arises from comparing bilinguals to monolinguals. Corpus research demonstrates that Spanish-English bilinguals produce shorter, more Spanish-like VOT in the lead up to an English-to-Spanish code switch [8,12]. The studies mentioned here focus on VOT-a small subset of the CLI literature. ...
... The delay was the product of natural pronunciation prolongation and corroborates experimental findings from Fricke, Kroll, and Dussias (2016). Using a Spanish-English bilingual corpus, the authors found that speech rate is reliably prolonged prior to code-switches, which in turn aids the processing of code-switches as demonstrated by an experimental study. ...
... Previous studies demonstrate that the prolongations prior to code-switches aid their processing (Fricke et al., 2016) and artificially removing phonetic cues can interfere with CS processing (Shen et al., 2020). Therefore, we did not alter the natural pronunciation of the CS in our recordings. ...
Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower-vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.
... Given that CS is used in very nuanced ways, researchers have been studying how people codeswitch, examining the switch-points of languages syntactically (Poplack, 1980;Solorio and Liu, 2008), prosodically (Fricke et al., 2016), lexically (Kootstra, 2012, pragmatically (Begum et al., 2016), and so forth. Many works have attempted to model code-switching text and speech from a statistical perspective (Garg et al., 2018a,b). ...
... Choice of language when code-switching can also be adapted in dialogues (Bawa et al., 2018). Fricke et al. (2016) further discover that part-of-speech of a CS utterance may impact the following language choice. Our work adds to this field by studying accommodation of language choice for lexical classes. ...
... Whereas Spanish words near a codeswitch did not result in a significant increase in Spanish VOT values in the direction of English, the converse was true such that the VOT of English words in the vicinity of a codeswitch into Spanish were significantly reduced (i.e., more Spanish-like). Fricke, Kroll, and Dussias (2016) similarly found that words in the proximity of codeswitches showed slower speech rate and exhibited cross-language phonological influence on consonant VOT (Bullock, 2009;Olsen 2013). ...
... both are inseparable processes, with shared and indivisible operations and representations (Meyer et al., 2016). Although there is no empirical evidence demonstrating that reading and writing are separable and independent processes, there is strong evidence showing the confluence of reading comprehension and writing production (Buz et al., 2016;Fricke et al., 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo et al., 2016;Hsiao & MacDonald, 2016;Kittredge & Dell, 2016;Zamuner et al., 2016). ...
Reading comprehension and writing are essential skills for success in modern societies. Additionally, reading and writing have been described as highly reflective activities that necessitate metacognitive monitoring and control. However, reading comprehension and writing are skills moderated by many factors, proficiency among them. Thus, in the present study we examined the influence of reading comprehension proficiency (proficient, poor) on elementary school students' (N = 120) metacognitive monitoring accuracy in reading and writing tasks. Further, we investigated the predictive patterns of linguistic indices between proficient and poor readers on their metacognitive monitoring accuracy of a writing task. Findings revealed that proficient readers exhibited significantly better monitoring accuracy in both reading and writing tasks, and that unique predictive patterns of linguistic indices on writing skill monitoring accuracy emerged between proficient and poor readers. We discuss the implications of these findings for research, theory, and practice and propose recommendations for future research.
... According to Amengual (2012), the influence of English is particularly evident in the pronunciation of /t/ in Spanish words with English cognates (e.g., tattoo and tatuaje). This claim is supported by Fricke et al., 2016), who suggested that cognates are subject to stronger phonological influence from the non-target language than that of non-cognates. Although these differences are subtle, they cause HS to sound less "native-like" than monolingual counterparts, despite being native speakers of the language. ...
In this paper, we address a lack of assessments of partner language development in dual language immersion (DLI) programs. We propose several important considerations that are necessary for the creation of research-based assessments of partner language development in DLI programs, focusing on Spanish as an example. We first discuss what these assessments need to test, concentrating on different areas of language that have proven to be challenging for heritage speakers and second language learners of Spanish, both of whom are students in these immersion programs. Next, we discuss how to assess these students through the use of implicit and explicit tasks and by measuring production and comprehension separately. We also advocate for embracing students’ translanguaging practices. Finally, we discuss why we need to assess partner language development. We propose that designing assessments that are simple to interpret will allow teachers, linguists, and policymakers to benefit from the data that they provide. For example, assessments of partner language development can contribute to assessment literacy and the creation of learning standards for bilingual schools. We argue that these considerations are essential for bringing DLI education to where we ought to be in the 21st century.
... Consistently, in spontaneous speech, switch costs were also typically paid before switch words were produced. For example, Fricke et al. (2016) divided the Bangor Miami Corpus into a series of "utterances" that consist of one main clause in each and measured the average syllable production duration of each utterance. In the corpus, bilinguals may switch in both directions, and the results showed significantly longer syllable production duration in utterances before language switching occurred in general. ...
Spanish-English (Experiments 1–2) or Chinese-English (Experiment 3) bilinguals described arrays of moving pictures in English that began with a complex or a simple phrase (e.g., “[The shoe and the mesa/桌子] moved above the cloud” vs. “[The shoe] moved above the mesa/桌子 and the cloud”). Bilinguals were trained to name the second picture in English for half the objects (e.g., “table”) and Spanish/Chinese (e.g., “mesa”/“桌子”) the other half. In complex-initial sentences, production durations of “shoe” and “and” were longer on switch than nonswitch trials; in simple-initial sentences, in Experiments 1–2, speech rate was not affected by switching until “mesa” was produced, and in Experiment 3 not until “above” was produced. Thus, bilinguals paid language switch costs just before or just as they started to produce a phrase with a language switch in it, suggesting that bilinguals complete phrasal planning in the default language before switching to the nondefault language.
... Similarly, we examine the role of code-switching in predicting the degree to which children can generalize word knowledge within and across their two languages. This growing body of work suggests that although code-switching can lead to processing costs during language production in adults (Bobb & Wodniecka, 2013;Fricke et al., 2016;Meuter & Allport, 1999), codeswitching may, nevertheless, be preferred by bilingual children to help fill lexical gaps (Kuzyk et al., 2020;Smolak et al., 2020). Code-switching in bilingual children has also been linked to components of executive function (Crivello et al., 2016;Kuzyk et al., 2020). ...
Purpose:
This article aims to describe how exemplar variability can manipulate the word learning environment to maximize within- and cross-language generalization in Spanish-English bilinguals. Furthermore, we examined sources of individual variability that predicted word learning.
Method:
Nineteen Spanish-English bilingual children participated in a word learning task presenting words in both languages. Children learned words either in a high variability condition (in which multiple exemplars are introduced with the target word) or in a no variability condition (in which the same referent is used with the target word). Word learning was tracked over the course of the training, and retention was examined once the training was discontinued. Children's generalization of referents within and across languages was also examined.
Results:
The exemplar variability effect was observed in within-language generalization trials, whereas cross-language generalization was less robust. Nevertheless, cross-language associations emerged in examining the role of language proficiency, such that semantic skills in English predicted word retention across languages. Similarly, children's propensity to code-switch during language production was positively correlated with retention of words learned in the high variability condition.
Conclusions:
The findings show that Spanish-English bilingual children may make use of exemplar variability to support word learning in different ways compared with monolinguals. The exemplar variability effect interacts with children's acquired language skills and word learning abilities at the start of the intervention. This study provides preliminary evidence from which future research can develop word learning interventions that are responsive to the needs of multilinguals.
Supplemental material:
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19241856.
... Even words that share the same coarse-grained phonemic units across languages will generally be pronounced in such a way as to make the intended language clear, i.e., cognates and interlingual homophones will be realized with different "accents" depending on the language being spoken. The empirical record is quite mixed, however, with a handful of studies reporting that participants could take advantage of such language-specific phonetic cues (Schulpen et al., 2003;Ju and Luce, 2004;Fricke et al., 2016), and others finding they could not (Lagrou et al., 2011;McDonald and Kaushanskaya, 2020). Critically for the present study, even if some participants are capable of exploiting language-specific cues when listening conditions are favorable, the ability to do so should be greatly reduced in the presence of competing noise as a result of energetic and/or informational masking (Mattys et al., 2014). ...
Previous research has shown that as the level of background noise increases, auditory word recognition performance drops off more rapidly for bilinguals than monolinguals. This disproportionate bilingual deficit has often been attributed to a presumed increase in cross-language activation in noise, although no studies have specifically tested for such an increase. We propose two distinct mechanisms by which background noise could cause an increase in cross-language activation: a phonetically based account and an executive function-based account. We explore the evidence for the phonetically based account by comparing cognate facilitation effects for three groups of native English listeners (monolinguals, late (L2) learners of Spanish, and heritage Spanish speakers) and four noise conditions (no noise, speech-shaped noise, English two-talker babble, and Spanish two-talker babble) during an auditory lexical decision task in English. By examining word recognition in the dominant language, the role of language control mechanisms is minimized, and by examining three different types of competing noise, the role of energetic vs. informational masking can be assessed. Contrary to predictions, we find no evidence that background noise modulates cross-language activation; cognate facilitation is constant across the four noise conditions. Instead, several indices of word recognition performance are found to correlate with aspects of linguistic experience: (1) The magnitude of the cognate facilitation effect is correlated with heritage listeners’ self-ratings of Spanish proficiency; (2) Overall noise deficits are marginally larger for heritage listeners with lower English vocabulary scores; (3) Heritage listeners’ Spanish self-ratings predict their magnitude of informational masking; (4) For all bilinguals, the degree of masking incurred in both English and Spanish two-talker babble is correlated with self-reported daily exposure to Spanish; and (5) The degree of masking incurred by Spanish babble is correlated with Spanish vocabulary knowledge. The results enrich our understanding of auditory word recognition in heritage speakers in particular and provide evidence that informational masking is most subject to modulation due to variation in linguistic experience. It remains to be seen whether cross-language activation is modulated by noise when the target language is the less dominant one.
... A phoneme is the smallest phonetic unit according to the natural features of utterance and is the basic component of a word (Daube et al., 2019;Fricke et al., 2016;Grainger et al., 2003;Mesgarani et al., 2014;Morais, 2021;Stevenson et al., 2017). The theory of phonological encoding (Coltheart et al., 1979;Dell, 1986Dell, , 1988Levelt et al., 1999;Qu et al., 2012Qu et al., , 2020 considers the importance of phonemes as units during word production in which information about pronunciation is retrieved from the mental lexicon in phonemic units (Qu et al.). ...
Aims: Cross-language interference studies of language control mainly focus on the lexical level, whereas language control may occur at the smallest unit phonemic level of language. In the present study, we examined the role of language control during cross-language phoneme processing.
Design: Participants used one language to name pinyin or alphabet in the single-language blocks, and they used two languages for naming in the mixed-language blocks.
Data and Analysis: Using a linear mixed-effects model, we built models for mixing costs and switching costs based on reaction times (RTs) and accuracy.
Findings: Switching between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) phonetic symbols revealed both mixing and switching costs.
Originality: The findings suggest that switching of cross-language phonemes requires not only global control of the non-target lexicon, but also local control of the non-target phonemes.
Significance: Just as cross-language interference control occurs at the lexical level, this study demonstrates that control also occurs at the phonemic level.
... ("Here you see that she is in need and needs entertainment") (Myslín & Levy, 2015, p. 872). Notably, evidence shows that this behaviour comes with cognitive costs as indicated by observations of a slow-down of speech rate in producing code-switched sentences compared to monolingual sentences (Costa & Santesteban, 2004;Faroqi-Shah & Wereley, n.d.;Fricke et al., 2016), as well as longer naming and reading times in trials where the language of use is changed compared to trials where it is not (Altarriba et al., 1996;Gollan & Ferreira, 2009;Linck et al., 2013;Meuter & Allport, 1999, but see Gullifer et al., 2013). Furthermore, EEG recordings during a sentence comprehension task reported a larger N400 component for sentences involving code-switched words, indexing switching costs related to lexico-semantic access and integration (Christoffels et al., 2007;van Hell & Witteman, 2009). ...
Bilingualism impacts brain structure, especially in regions involved in language control and processing. However, the relation between structural brain changes and key aspects of bilingual language use is still poorly understood. Here we used structural MRI and non-linear modelling to investigate the effects of habitual code-switching (CS) practices on brain structure among Czech-English bilinguals. We studied the effects of usage frequency of various CS types (categorised by directionality and level of language separation) on the volumes of the caudate nucleus and the thalamus. Caudate volumes were positively correlated with overall CS frequency, with stronger effects for switches from L1 to L2. Thalamic volumes were positively correlated with engagement in forms of CS for which the two languages are more separate, with stronger effects for switching from L2 to L1. These results underscore the importance of using detailed measures of bilingual experiences when investigating the sources of bilingualism-induced neuroplasticity.
... This is a common practice in bilingual speakers and is called code-switching. Like adult bilinguals, bilingual children experience code-switching (Bobb & Wodniecka, 2013;Fricke et al., 2016). Exposure to code-switching does not carry any risks and may be associated with better language outcomes in children capable of processing such input (Kaushanskaya & Crespo, 2019). ...
The number of immigrant families in Canada and other Western countries has increased in the last several decades. Immigrant families face challenges in bringing up their children in a new country, such as different expectations from two different cultures, being away from their family and immediate support network, financial problems, and language limitations. One of the main concerns of most immigrant parents is their child's language acquisition. Language development is the most significant predictor of children's success in school and later life. Regarding the vital role of language development in each aspect of life, it is essential to explore this growing population's experiences and challenges related to their children's language acquisition. This qualitative study benefited from a narrative inquiry for representing and interpreting an immigrant mother's experiences and challenges in bringing up a bilingual child in Canada. This paper addresses the multiple conflicts affecting immigrant parents' decision to bring up a bilingual or monolingual child. Some of immigrant parents' main concerns, including passing on their accents, code-switching, language delays, limited social interactions and using screen time for teaching language are discussed in this paper.
... Another means of targeting putative code-switching constraints is to examine online processing of code switches, in this case applying eye-tracking technology. Eye tracking has produced useful results in the study of code switching, using both written (e.g., Gollan et al., 2014;Guzzardo Tamargo et al., 2016) and auditory (e.g., Fricke et al., 2016) stimuli. As a further probe into Misiones heritage Portuguese speakers' reactions to specific code-switching configurations, an eye-tracking experiment offered online processing data. ...
This study examines sensitivity to putative grammatical constraints on intra-sentential code-switching, viewed as a relative measure of attainment in heritage bilingual grammars. This is exemplified by a series of interactive tasks carried out with heritage Portuguese speakers in Misiones Province, Argentina. The results demonstrate the viability of deploying a range of experimental techniques in field settings with heritage speakers who do not engage in habitual code switching.
... The seemingly more robust mixing cost in the current study could be due to a multitude of methodological differences with Gullifer et al. (2013), such as the current study requiring Dutch-French bilinguals to produce full sentences, whereas Gullifer et al. (2013) asked their Spanish-English bilingual participants to silently read most of each sentence and then read out loud one marked word. Another notable difference is that Gullifer and colleagues relied on RTs and error rates, whereas the current study relied on language intrusions and, for the first time in a language control study, filled pauses (for a language switching study relying on other dysfluencies, see Fricke, Kroll, & Dussias, 2016). Though, reaction times are similar to filled pauses in the sense that they both allow insight into cognitive load. ...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions
While evidence for proactive language control processes has been found during single word production, very little and conflicting evidence has been observed for such control processes during sentence production. So, the main goal of this study was to investigate whether proactive language control can occur during sentence production.
Design/methodology/approach
To investigate proactive language control during sentence production, we relied on a description task in single and mixed language blocks.
Data and analysis
Mixing costs and the reversed language dominance effect of language intrusions and filled pauses were used to examine proactive language control.
Findings/conclusions
Evidence for proactive language control during sentence production came from the mixing cost effect observed with both language intrusions and filled pauses. Whereas no reversed language dominance effect was observed in mixed language blocks, a significant difference in language pattern was observed between single and mixed language blocks, indicating that proactive language control of the first language might be implemented in mixed language blocks during sentence production.
Originality
Unlike the vast majority of studies investigating language control, this study relied on sentence production instead of single word production. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine filled pauses to gain insight into language control.
Significance/implications
These data indicate that proactive language control can be implemented during bilingual sentence production.
... Presently, studies on CS cost are inconclusive. Fricke, Kroll and Dussias (2016) analyzed speech rate and disfluency in naturalistic CS data from Spanish/English bilinguals from Miami and found a decrease in articulation rate right before other language single-word insertions, suggestive of a processing cost. More recent research on data from New Mexico Spanish/English bilinguals reveals, however, that while switching may be costly at the lexical level, it is facilitative at the clausal level and promotes overall faster speech rates than in monolingual discourse (Johns and Steuck 2021). ...
In previous research, there has been an emphasis on differentiating and distancing translanguaging from codeswitching, partly on the basis that the latter refers to the combination of two discrete systems that correspond to named languages. While this is the mainstream view, there are codeswitching scholars who have proposed alternative views that align with some of the same observations and criticisms that have been raised by proponents of translanguaging. In this conceptual paper, I provide an overview of translanguaging alongside opposing views of codeswitching, and I underscore important similarities that have thus far been absent from present discussions regarding translanguaging versus codeswitching. Drawing on data from the understudied Spanish/English codeswitching variety spoken in Northern Belize, I discuss how bilingual compound verbs lend support to alternative views of codeswitching. Despite clear differences in their empirical goals, research conducted by both codeswitching and translanguaging scholars compels us to reexamine fundamental notions about language and linguistic competence. This reevaluation will not only contribute to theoretical advancement, but it will further elucidate our understanding of the complexity and dynamicity that characterizes bi/multilingual speech production and processing.
... Socio relates to the society that interacts with each other; whereas linguistic refers to the language that the citizen speaks (Verhoven, 2017;Hymes, sentences in the language not currently in use, but they do not know the specific word to it which usually happens to bilinguals or multi-linguals that have the ability to simultaneously activate between both languages to deliver their message (Beatty-Martinez & Dussias, 2017;Kaushankaya & Crespo, 2019;Yang, Hartanto & Yang, 2016). Hence, code-switching will happen in this type of circumstances in order to minimize the risks of uttering the wrong words and to self-position themselves in performing their identity of a certain group (Frickle, Kroll & Dussias, 2016; Garderner-Chloros, 2020). ...
This qualitative study will investigate English Education students’ opinion towards code-switching and code-mixing; both in everyday and classroom use. In this study, it will employ an open-ended (short-answered questionnaire) with 13 questions that mainly focus students of English Education class of 2016-2018. The populations were chosen because the students of 2016-2018 have attended Sociolinguistic Course during semester 3. Moreover, to gather the population, the researcher spread the link of questionnaire written in Google Form by personally contacting several people via Whats App. Based on the findings obtained from the questionnaire, it can be inferred that the 20 respondents mainly spoke 3 languages (national: Indonesian, local: Javanese, foreign: English). Furthermore, it can be concluded that 11 respondents find code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages acceptable to be used in everyday life and classroom situation. On the contrary, 3 respondents also see code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages annoying and disturbing to be implemented in daily communication. Meanwhile, 6 respondents perceive code-switching and code-mixing of national, local and foreign languages as neutral to be executed in everyday and classroom situation. Keywords: Sociolinguistic; Code-Switching; Code-Mixing; English Education Students
... According to Ariffin & Hussin (2011), code-switching is considered as a hurdle when learning a new language. It is noteworthy to highlight that the emphasis of code-switching researches, thus far, are predominantly centred on the use of language change, levied by the word level manipulation between speaker and listener (Fricke et al., 2016). The speakers" articulatory demeanours among bilinguals are observed to modify the phonological facets and shift the lexical choices (Tamargo et al., 2016;Shen et al., 2020). ...
This paper examines an asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) between bilingual university students in Malaysia, in particular via Whatsapp by appropriating a functional approach in scrutinizing the diverse types and influences for codeswitching (CS). A quantitative methodology was employed wherein a survey was designed and administered to undergraduate students from the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM). A dataset from a total of 90 respondents was collected from five faculties; Academy of Language Studies, Faculty of Law, Faculty of Communication and Media Studies and Faculty of Education. The yielded findings postulate that inter-sentential code-switching was the most used type of code-switching among the respondents and habitual expression is the main factor that influence them to code-switch.
... The code-switched instructions were naturally pronounced with a slight prolongation before the CS onset compared to the Spanish version (mean difference = 22 ms). We left this delay unchanged, as slight delays have been found to precede code-switches in bilingual discourse and aid the processing of a CS (Fricke et al., 2016). Taking these cues out can make CS processing more difficult (Shen et al., 2020). ...
Monolinguals use various linguistic phenomena to guide prediction while comprehending. For bilinguals, the richer linguistic landscape provides additional resources. Code-switches (CS) are a particularly salient event which could play a role in bilingual prediction. Despite their ubiquity and diverse functions, experimental research has focused on CS processing costs, largely in comprehension (Litcofsky & Van Hell 2017). We argue that, despite apparent integration costs, code-switching can facilitate subsequent language processing, due to natural code-switching patterns. We illustrate this approach with two eye-tracking studies suggesting that code-switches are used as a cue that a less frequent or negative word follows. These studies underscore the need to integrate socio-pragmatic and corpus-modeling observations with experimentation to reach a comprehensive understanding of CS processing (Myers-Scotton, 2006).
... language influence than other tokens [38,11]. ...
... Stimuli were recorded with neutral intonation in a sound-attenuated booth using a Shure SM35 head-worn cardioid condenser headset microphone and were then normalized for intensity in Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2020). English nouns and adjec-tives were not spliced into the unilingual Spanish condition in order to create more naturalistic stimuli free from any artefacts that may influence online processing (e.g., Fricke, Kroll & Dussias, 2016). This is particularly important given that the measure chosen -the pupillary response -is sensitive to changes in attention and arousal that could be brought on by unexpected qualities in the stimuli (e.g., Wetzel, Buttelmann, Schieler, & Widmann, 2016). ...
The transfer of words from one language to another is ubiquitous in many of the world’s languages. While loanwords have a rich literature in the fields of historical linguistics, language contact, and sociolinguistics, little work has been done examining how loanwords are processed by bilinguals with knowledge of both the source and recipient languages. The present study uses pupillometry to compare the online processing of established loanwords in Puerto Rican Spanish to native Spanish words by highly proficient Puerto Rican Spanish-English bilinguals. Established loanwords elicited a significantly larger pupillary response than native Spanish words, with the pupillary response modulated by both the frequency of the loanword itself and of the native Spanish counterpart. These findings suggest that established loanwords are processed differently than native Spanish words and compete with their native equivalents, potentially due to both intra- and inter-lingual effects of saliency.
... between production and comprehension after analysing English native speakers' neural responses while hearing and comprehending naturalistic narrative speech. In a similar vein, recent findings from code-switching with Spanish -English bilinguals point to a shared architecture for production and comprehension processes in bilinguals: bilingual adults were sensitive to distributional patterns in production and were guided by them in the comprehension of code-switched utterances (Fricke, Kroll & Dussias, 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo, Valdés Kroff & Dussias, 2016). It is, however, still too early to reach conclusions as to whether or not the links between production and comprehension are identical in monolingual and bilingual processing, since research has also indicated that the link between the two processes may differ across L1 and L2 processing. ...
... A study done by Fricke et al. (2016) shows that Spanish-English bilinguals can use lower-level phonetic details to anticipate upcoming code-switching. Fricke et al. ...
https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/iulcwp/article/view/31672
... Research shows that comprehension and production are: 1) separated, meaning nonexistence of influences in their representations and processes; 2) separable, meaning these representations and processes are shared and they commune under certain circumstances; and 3) inseparable, meaning these processes and representations are shared and indivisible (Meyer et al., 2016). While there is no evidence thus far on the nature of reading and writing as cognitive activities with separate and individual processes and representations, there is ample evidence on confluences between comprehension and production (Buz et al., 2016;Fricke et al., 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo et al., 2016;Hsiao & MacDonald, 2016;Kittredge & Dell, 2016;Zamuner et al., 2016). ...
Background
Reading and writing are both fundamental activities for successful learning. However, little is known about the effect of reading comprehension performance on writing, as well as the pedagogical guidelines that can be drawn from this influence.
Method
Thus, the purpose of the present investigation was to examine the influence of performance in reading comprehension, distinguishing between poor and proficient readers ( N = 105), who were enrolled in four eighth‐grade classes between the ages of 12 and 14, on the writing of narrative and expository texts.
Results
Results revealed that proficient readers outperformed poor readers on objective measures of text production and informative/expository texts. Additionally, regression models demonstrated that proficient readers relied more on deeper aspects of reading and writing such as inferential skills, whereas poor readers tended to focus on superficial aspects of texts, or what Kintsch referred to as text‐base, and appeared to perform better in reading and writing tasks related to narratives compared to information‐based, expository texts.
Conclusion
These results support the theoretical perspectives of Kintsch's construction–integration model and Otero's regulation model regarding the relation between reading, writing and mental representations.
... How might these lab-based studies examining switching at the lexical level align with studies examining spontaneous production? In a similar study examining speech rate during spontaneous language mixing, Fricke, Kroll, & Dussias, 2016 found that articulation rate, a measure which excludes pauses, decreased just before single-word insertions of one language into the other. This localized reduction in articulation rate parallels the persistence of switch costs even in voluntary cued language-switching studies. ...
A common practice often attested in bilingual and multilingual communities the world over is the combination of languages within a single utterance or conversation, a practice known as codeswitching. While sociolinguistic studies of spontaneous codeswitching have demonstrated its structure and systematicity, psycholinguistic approaches have focused on the cognitive mechanisms underlying language switching, most often at the lexical level. In the present study, we seek to investigate these mechanisms using spontaneous codeswitching from an established community of Spanish-English bilinguals in northern New Mexico. Focusing on the clausal rather than the lexical level, we find that global speech rates are fastest when bilinguals codeswitch compared to speaking only one language at a time. These results point to codeswitching as a unique discourse mode that these bilinguals use to facilitate production and suggests that what may appear costly at one level may be beneficial at another.
... The results of these studies suggest that the activation of non-target phonological representations when bilinguals pronounce cognate items interferes with the acoustic realization of sounds in the target language, enhancing crosslinguistic influence in bilingual speech. And as shown specifically for voiceless stops, the VOTs of cognate words are subject to a stronger phonological influence from the non-target language than non-cognates (Amengual, 2012;Flege and Munro, 1994;Fricke et al., 2016;Goldrick et al., 2014;Jacobs et al., 2016). As Goldrick et al. (2014) explain, "the activation of non-target language representations for cognates will cascade to phonetic processes, enhancing the degree to which phonetic properties of the non-target language intrude during production" (p. ...
The present study examines the acoustic realization of the English, Japanese, and Spanish /k/ in the productions of two groups of English-Japanese bilinguals [first language (L1) English-second language (L2) Japanese and L1 Japanese-L2 English] and one trilingual group [L1 Spanish-L2 English-third language (L3) Japanese]. With the analysis of voice onset time (VOT) as a proxy for the degree of cross-linguistic influence in each language, this experiment compares the production patterns of L2 and L3 learners of Japanese and explores the effects of language mode and cognate status on the speech patterns in each of the languages of these bilingual and trilingual individuals. By manipulating the degree of activation of the target and non-target language(s) with the use of cognates and non-cognates in monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual experimental sessions, this study investigates static as well as transient phonetic influence. Even though these bilingual and trilingual speakers produce language-specific VOT patterns for each language, the acoustic analyses also reveal evidence of phonetic convergence as a result of language mode and cognate status. These results show that trilingual speakers are able to maintain language-specific phonological categories in their L1, L2, and L3, overcoming long-term (static) traces of one language influencing the other, despite evidence of short-term (dynamic) cross-linguistic influence.
... Finally, native speakers of code-switching varieties (i.e., speakers whose native language experience is characterized by code-switching) have also been reported to use distributional regularities (e.g., knowledge of the acceptability of particular types of code-switches) in language processing (Beatty-Martinez & Dussias, 2017;Fricke, Kroll, & Dussias, 2016;Guzzardo Tamargo, Valdés Kroff, Dussias, 2016;Valdés Kroff, Dussias, Gerfen, Perrotti, & Bajo, 2017). In sum, these studies suggest that (at least some) patterns of systematic variation found in production have correlates in processing, with faster processing of certain variants over others, particularly in linguistic or social contexts, where those variants are more frequent in production. ...
The current study investigates cross-linguistic influence of second language (L2) learning on native language (L1) processing of morphosyntactic variation in proficient L2 learners immersed in their L1. Despite Spanish pre-and postverbal clitic pronoun positions being grammatical in complex verb phrases, preferences of use have been well attested in natu-ralistic language production. To examine whether those preferences obtain for comprehension in monolinguals, as well as how those preferences might be modulated by learning an L2 with fixed pronoun positions, we administered a self-paced reading experiment to 20 Spanish monolinguals as well as 22 proficient learners English (L1 Spanish). The results of a Bayesian mixed effects regression analysis suggest that preferences in production are echoed in comprehension-but only for the monolingual group. We find support for facilitation in the bilingual group precisely where both languages overlap, as well as evidence that bilinguals may not use clitic position as a reliable cue at all. We interpret the results as evidence that learning an L2 that lacks variation for a particular feature may lead to reduced sensitivity to that feature as a cue in an analogous L1 structure. We situate these results in an experience-based, shared-syntax account of language processing.
... Prior research in both perception and production suggests that while some aspects of voice variability differ for linguistic reasons, other talker-indexical features remain constant across languages, and still others can be influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors. That bilingual listeners are sensitive to this information signals its importance [5,6]. ...
Purpose
Traditional approaches to studying bilingual language development through bilingual–monolingual comparisons are deeply flawed. They are also insufficient as the evidence base for informing advice to bilingual parents regarding the optimal bilingual exposure strategy and for supporting the formulation of bilingual intervention approaches. The purpose of this review article is to provide an overview of empirical studies that have queried the question of how different types of dual-language input shape learning and language outcomes in bilingual children.
Method
We rely on tightly controlled experimental studies of word learning in Spanish–English bilingual children, where we contrast children's learning in dual-language conditions (defined as distributed exposure and code-switched input) to a single-language condition in a within-subjects design.
Results
Word-learning studies querying the role of distributed exposure indicated that distribution of exposures across Spanish and English reduced children's performance in comparison to English-only exposure. However, this effect was rooted in the abrupt switch from Spanish to English rather than distributed exposure itself. In contrast, an experiment designed to test the role of code-switched context on children's word learning revealed that code-switched context where switches resembled naturalistic code-switching behaviors enhanced learning in Spanish–English bilingual children. Notably, across different studies, children with weaker language skills (developmental language disorder) were no more affected by dual-language input than children with typical language skills.
Conclusions
Together, experimental studies of word learning indicate that bilingual children can effectively learn from dual-language input but that different ways of combining languages in the input to bilingual children can have distinct consequences for learning. Ultimately, word-learning experiments, beyond answering critical questions regarding bilingual learning, can serve as an effective bridge between laboratory-based work and intervention studies whose goal it is to discover the optimal way of combining languages in the input to bilingual children with communication impairments.
Presentation Video
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23929515
A recent model of sound change posits that the direction of change is determined, at least in part, by the distribution of variation within speech communities. We explore this model in the context of bilingual speech, asking whether the less variable language constrains phonetic variation in the more variable language, using a corpus of spontaneous speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals. As predicted, given the phonetic distributions of stop obstruents in Cantonese compared with English, intervocalic English /b d g/ were produced with less voicing for Cantonese-English bilinguals and word-final English /t k/ were more likely to be unreleased compared with spontaneous speech from two monolingual English control corpora. Whereas voicing initial obstruents can be gradient in Cantonese, the release of final obstruents is prohibited. Neither Cantonese-English bilingual initial voicing nor word-final stop release patterns were significantly impacted by language mode. These results provide evidence that the phonetic variation in crosslinguistically linked categories in bilingual speech is shaped by the distribution of phonetic variation within each language, thus suggesting a mechanistic account for why some segments are more susceptible to cross-language influence than others.
Aims and objectives
Previous research has revealed much about the syntactic and social variables conditioning code-switching (i.e., the alternation between two or more languages in a discourse or utterance); however, little is known about the phonological effects. Our work explores this area by asking two main questions: (1) Does lexical tone affect code-switching between a tonal language and a non-tonal language? and (2) Is this effect (or lack thereof) observable cross-linguistically?
Methodology
We examine natural code-switching production between Cantonese and English, Mandarin and English, and Vietnamese and English. We use a semi-automatic natural-language processing method to process and extract relevant variables, including tonal categories at switch points.
Data and analysis
Data include transcribed natural speech from three bilingual corpora: the HLVC corpus (Cantonese/English, 25 speakers), the SEAME corpus (Mandarin/English, 20 speakers), and the CanVEC corpus (Vietnamese/English, 45 speakers). We use logistic mixed-effects models to examine tonal effects, taking into account other factors such as frequency and grammatical category.
Findings/conclusion
We found a robust tonal effect in Cantonese/English, a less robust effect in Mandarin/English, and no effect in Vietnamese/English. This indicates there is a tonal effect in code-switching between a tonal and a non-tonal language, but this effect is language-dependent. We also found a specific T3 ‘step-up’ pattern at Cantonese-English switch points and offered some possible phonological explanations.
Originality
This is the first study that systematically investigates tonal effects in code-switching across different language pairs, using comparable data and methods. Our finding of a Cantonese-English T3 ‘step-up’ pattern is also a novel discovery that hitherto has not been documented.
Significance/implications
Theoretically, our findings support Clyne’s ‘facilitation theory’ in code-switching at a prosodic level. Empirically, we nevertheless emphasised the complexity of different prosodic features and social variables in play, thereby rejecting the idea of ‘predicting’ code-switching solely based on linguistic factors.
In our increasingly multilingual modern world, understanding how languages beyond the first are acquired and processed at a brain level is essential to design evidence-based teaching, clinical interventions and language policy. Written by a team of world-leading experts in a wide range of disciplines within cognitive science, this Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of the study of third (and more) language acquisition and processing. It features 30 approachable chapters covering topics such as multilingual language acquisition, education, language maintenance and language loss, multilingual code-switching, ageing in the multilingual brain, and many more. Each chapter provides an accessible overview of the state of the art in its topic, while offering comprehensive access to the specialized literature, through carefully curated citations. It also serves as a methodological resource for researchers in the field, offering chapters on methods such as case studies, corpora, artificial language systems or statistical modelling of multilingual data.
When a bilingual switches languages, do they switch their voice? Using a conversational corpus of speech from early Cantonese-English bilinguals (n = 34), this paper examines the talker-specific acoustic signatures of bilingual voices. Following the psychoacoustic model of voice, 24 filter and source-based acoustic measurements are estimated. The analysis summarizes mean differences for these dimensions and identifies the underlying structure of each talker's voice across languages with principal component analyses. Canonical redundancy analyses demonstrate that while talkers vary in the degree to which they have the same voice across languages, all talkers show strong similarity with themselves, suggesting an individual's voice remains relatively constant across languages. Voice variability is sensitive to sample size, and we establish the required sample to settle on a consistent impression of one's voice. These results have implications for human and machine voice recognition for bilinguals and monolinguals and speak to the substance of voice prototypes.
The way bilinguals switch languages can differ depending on the context. In cued dual-language environments, bilinguals select a language in response to environmental cues (e.g., a monolingual conversation partner). In voluntary dual-language environments, bilinguals communicating with people who speak the same languages can use their languages more freely. The control demands of these types of language-production contexts, and the costs of language switches, have been argued to differ (Adaptive Control Hypothesis, Green & Abutalebi, 2013). Here we used a dual-task paradigm to examine how cued and voluntary bilingual production differ in cognitive resources used. Forty Mandarin-English bilinguals completed two language-switching paradigms as the primary task; one in response to cues and one while using two languages freely. At the same time, they also had to respond to the pitch of tones (secondary task). Response times (RTs) on the secondary task, as well as naming times on the primary task, were shorter in the voluntary- than cued-naming condition. Task workload ratings were also higher in the cued- than voluntary-naming condition. This suggests more attentional resources are needed in a cued-naming context to monitor cues and select languages accordingly. However, the costs associated with switching from one language to the other were similar in both voluntary and cued naming contexts. Thus, while cued naming might be more effortful overall, cued and voluntary switching recruited similar levels of cognitive resources.
“Triggered switching” is the theory that code-switching happens more often with words connected to both languages, such as cognates. Corpus analyses have supported this theory; however, they do not allow testing for directional causality. Here, we test the triggering hypothesis through a picture-naming task, and examine whether cognates trigger code-switches, as well as more subtle interference effects resulting in disfluencies. Forty English-Spanish bilinguals completed a picture-cued sentence production task in three conditions: English-only, Spanish-only, and mixed. Half of the pictures represented Spanish-English cognates. Unsurprisingly, participants were more likely to code-switch when asked to use both their languages compared to only their dominant or non-dominant language. However, participants were not more likely to switch languages for cognate than for non-cognate trials. Participants tended to be more fluent on cognate trials in the dominant and the non-dominant condition, and on non-cognate trials in the mixed-language condition, although these effects were not significant. These findings suggest that both language context and cognate status are important to consider when testing both overt switches and disfluencies in bilingual speech production.
While much of the existing literature on code-switching focuses on languages that differ typologically, this dissertation focuses on typologically similar languages. Code-switching between Mandarin and Taiwanese is examined through the perspectives of 1) sociolinguistics, 2) typology, 3) phonetic and phonological production, and 4) speech perception. Sociolinguistically, a questionnaire that examined usage domains and sociolinguistic perception revealed that Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switching is predominantly used in informal situations with social equals. Moreover, despite Taiwanese being a low-prestige language in Taiwan, Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switching is perceived positively and associated with solidarity. For the typological and phonetic/phonological investigations, a Mandarin-Taiwanese bilingual corpus containing approximately 11.6 hours of spontaneous speech was built. It was found that typologically, Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switching patterns can be affected by the sociolinguistic standings of the languages, the lexical gaps in the languages, a speaker’s language dominance level, and the dominant language of the conversation. For the phonetic and phonological analyses, the production of Mandarin Tone 3 (T3) at code-switching boundary was examined to determine if speech production is affected by the relative level of language activation. On the phonetic level, code-switching boundary T3 contour is reduced when using monolingual language mode (i.e., speaking monolingually), and shows more variability when using bilingual language mode (i.e., speaking bilingually), suggesting a difference in language activation patterns in the code-switching in monolingual vs. bilingual language modes. On the phonological level, cross-language Mandarin T3 sandhi is more rule-governed when Mandarin is the matrix language of the code-switching utterance, revealing higher phonological control of sounds from the language at a higher level of activation. For the perception examination, a reaction time experiment was conducted to explore the perceptual cues of Mandarin-Taiwanese code-switching on the code-switched word. The results show that Mandarin-Taiwanese bilinguals are more sensitive to language-specific phonetic properties that occur earlier in the word, i.e., onset and nucleus.
This study analyses the relationship between native English speakers’ perception and production of the novel French /y/–/u/ contrast. Acoustic data were extracted from the learners’ production of French minimal pairs contrasting these French vowels and compared with their processing of the same items in a Visual World eye-tracking task. Results reveal that the vowel most acoustically similar to the learners’ native English /u/ vowel, French /y/, is both easier to identify at early processing stages and more acoustically similar to a native French control group in production, indicating a perception-production relationship. Furthermore, analyses of individual variation reveal that the learners who process both /y/ and /u/ more successfully at later processing stages are also more likely to mark a greater distinction between these phonemes in production. Together, these results indicate a relationship between L2 processing and L2 production at multiple levels. Implications for current L2 speech models are discussed.
Aims and objectives
Studies of code-switching (CS) in bilingual speakers using laboratory tasks have been equivocal on whether CS is cognitively demanding. The goal of this study was to examine time costs at the juncture of a CS in a more ecologically valid experimental paradigm.
Methodology
English (L1)–French (L2) bilingual speakers performed two tasks. The primary experimental task was a novel paradigm that elicited voluntary code-switches in conversation with a bilingual interlocutor. A silent self-paced reading task was used to compare with a laboratory task with involuntary switches.
Data and analysis
Intersyllabic durations (conversation task) and reading times (reading task) were analyzed. CS cost was the time difference between code-switches and matched non-switches. Cost-switching costs for each switch direction (English-to-French and French-to-English) and type of switch (alternations and insertions) were also compared.
Findings
Code-switches in conversation were associated with a time cost, and the magnitude was comparable in both directions although speakers more frequently switched from French-to-English. In self-paced reading, switching costs were observed only for switches into the dominant language. Across both tasks, there were no differences in CS time cost between insertions and alternations.
Originality
This study reports a novel measure of CS costs in conversation, intersyllabic duration, and provides a cross-task comparison in the same group of bilingual speakers to better inform theories of CS.
Implications
Bilingual speakers experience a time cost when making voluntary switches in conversations. The symmetrical switch costs suggest that both languages have similar activation levels throughout the conversation, and the cognitive costs arise from the act of momentarily switching languages, irrespective of their dominance. In self-paced reading, cognitive costs arise from disturbing the status quo of relative activation-inhibition of each language adopted to perform the task. The comparable CS time cost for insertions and alternations suggests similar cognitive control and linguistic planning mechanisms for both types of switches.
Bilinguals living in a bilingual society continuously need to choose one of their languages to communicate a message. Sometimes, the circumstances (e.g., the presence of a monolingual) dictate language choice. When surrounded by other bilinguals, however, the bilinguals themselves can often decide which language to use. While much previous research has assessed language production when language selection is predetermined, we assessed how bilinguals choose the naming language themselves. We focused on the role of personal language preferences and examined to what extent personal preferences might be affected by external, suggestive language primes. Spanish-Basque bilinguals were asked to name pictures in their language of choice. Pictures were either presented on their own or were preceded by a linguistic or non-linguistic prime. In a separate session, participants were asked which language they preferred for each picture. Language choice during voluntary picture naming was related to personal language preferences. A bilingual was more likely to name a picture in the language they preferred for that specific picture. Furthermore, bilinguals were more likely to choose the language matching the preceding linguistic or non-linguistic prime. Effects of primes and preferences were additive and the influence of language preference on choice was equally strong in the primed and no-prime tasks. In addition to modulating language choice, following preferences and primes was also associated with faster responses. Together, these findings show that initial stages of language production and language choice are not just modulated by external primes but also by a bilingual's individual preferences.
Spanish–English bilinguals switched between naming pictures in one language and either reading-aloud or semantically classifying written words in both languages. When switching between reading-aloud and picture-naming, bilinguals exhibited no language switch costs in picture-naming even though they produced overt language switches in speech. However, when switching between semantic classification and picture-naming, bilinguals, especially unbalanced bilinguals, exhibited switch costs in the dominant language and switch facilitation in the nondominant language even though they never switched languages overtly. These results reveal language switching across comprehension and production can be cost-free when the intention remains the same. Assuming switch costs at least partially reflect inhibition of the nontarget language, this implies such language control mechanisms are recruited only under demanding task conditions, especially for unbalanced bilinguals. These results provide striking demonstration of adaptive control mechanisms and call into question previous claims that language switch costs necessarily transfer from comprehension to production.
The ability to differentiate between two languages sets the stage for bilingual learning. Infants can discriminate languages when hearing long passages, but language switches often occur on short time scales with few cues to language identity. As bilingual infants begin learning sequences of sounds and words, how do they detect the dynamics of two languages? In two studies using the head-turn preference procedure, we investigated whether infants (n = 44) can discriminate languages at the level of individual words. In Study 1, bilingual and monolingual 8- to 12-month-olds were tested on their detection of single-word language switching in lists of words (e.g., “dog… lait [fr. milk]”). In Study 2, they were tested on language switching within sentences (e.g., “Do you like the lait?”). We found that infants were unable to detect language switching in lists of words, but the results were inconclusive about infants’ ability to detect language switching within sentences. No differences were observed between bilinguals and monolinguals. Given that bilingual proficiency eventually requires detection of sound sequences across two languages, more research will be needed to conclusively understand when and how this skill emerges. Materials, data, and analysis scripts are available at https://osf.io/9dtwn/.
The primary goal of research on the functional and neural architecture of bilingualism is to elucidate how bilingual individuals' language architecture is organized such that they can both speak in a single language without accidental insertions of the other, but also flexibly switch between their two languages if the context allows/demands them to. Here we review the principles under which any proposed architecture could operate, and present a framework where the selection mechanism for individual elements strictly operates on the basis of the highest level of activation and does not require suppressing representations in the non-target language. We specify the conjunction of parameters and factors that jointly determine these levels of activation and develop a theory of bilingual language organization that extends beyond the lexical level to other levels of representation (i.e., semantics, morphology, syntax and phonology). The proposed architecture assumes a common selection principle at each linguistic level to account for attested features of bilingual speech in, but crucially also out, of experimental settings.
Speech production in multilinguals involves constant inhibition of the languages currently not in use. In relation to phonological development, higher inhibitory skills may lead to the improved suppression of interference from the remaining languages in one’s repertoire and more accurate production of target features. The participants were 20 sequential multilingual learners (13-year-olds with L1 Polish, L2 English, L3 German), acquiring their L2 and L3 by formal instruction in a primary school. Inhibition was measured in a modified flanker task (Eriksen & Eriksen 1974; Poarch & Bialystok 2015). Multilingual production of voice onset time (VOT) and rhotic consonants was tested in a delayed repetition task (e.g. Kopečková et al. 2016; Krzysik 2019) in their L2 and L3. The results revealed that higher inhibitory control was related to increased global accuracy in the L2 and L3 production. Moreover, higher inhibitory control was also linked to higher accuracy in the overall L2 production, but there was no significant relationship with the L3 accuracy. These findings suggest that inhibition may play a role in phonological speech production, however, it may depend on one’s level of proficiency.
The contentious question of bilingual processing cost may be recast as a fresh question of code-switching (CS) strategies—quantitative preferences and structural adjustments for switching at particular junctures of two languages. CS strategies are established by considering prosodic and syntactic variables, capitalizing here on bidirectional multi-word CS, spontaneously produced by members of a bilingual community in northern New Mexico who regularly use both languages (Torres Cacoullos and Travis, 2018). CS strategies become apparent by extending the equivalence constraint, which states that bilinguals avoid CS at points of word placement conflict (Poplack, 1980), to examine points of inconsistent equivalence between the languages, where syntactic difficulty could arise. Such sites of variable equivalence are junctures where the word strings of the two languages are equivalent only sometimes due to language-internal variable structures. A case in point for the English-Spanish language pair is the boundary between main and complement clauses, where a conjunction occurs always in Spanish but variably in English. The prosodic distancing strategy is to separate the juncture of the two languages. Here the complement clause appears in a different prosodic unit from the main clause—disproportionately as compared both with monolingual benchmarks and with bilinguals’ own unilingual English and Spanish. Prosodic distancing serves to mitigate variable equivalence. The syntactic selection strategy is to opt for the variant that is more quantitatively available and more discourse neutral. Here the preference is for the Spanish complementizer que—regardless of main or complement clause language. This is the more frequent option in bilinguals’ combined experience in both their languages, whereas the English complementizer that is subject to a number of conditioning factors. Syntactic selection serves to restore equivalence. Discovery of community CS strategies may spur reconsideration of processing cost as a matter of relative difficulty, which will depend on bilinguals’ prosodic and syntactic choices at particular CS sites.
The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and the consequences that bilingualism holds for cognition and the brain over the life span. Contrary to the view that bilingualism complicates the language system, this new research demonstrates that all of the languages that are known and used become part of the same language system. The interactions that arise when two languages are in play have consequences for the mind and the brain and, indeed, for language processing itself, but those consequences are not additive. Thus, bilingualism helps reveal the fundamental architecture and mechanisms of language processing that are otherwise hidden in monolingual speakers.
Two key assumptions underpin the cognitive neuroscience of language. First, there is a clear-cut split between the processes involved in understanding an utterance (recognizing a word, resolving ambiguity) and the processes involved in crafting that utterance (translating an idea into sound or writing). For example, the “classic” Lichtheim–Broca–Wernicke model proposes distinct anatomical pathways associated with production and comprehension, primarily on the basis of deficit–lesion correlations in aphasia (1). Second, researchers assume that the linguistic mechanisms are lateralized, with production processes (e.g., lexical selection, articulation) and, to some extent, comprehension processes primarily occurring in the left hemisphere. Silbert et al. (2) report a neuroimaging study based on the production and comprehension of naturalistic narrative that challenges these two assumptions.
A series of discoveries in the last two decades has changed the way we think about bilingualism and its implications for language and cognition. One is that both languages are always active. The parallel activation of the two languages is thought to give rise to competition that imposes demands on the bilingual to control the language not in use to achieve fluency in the target language. The second is that there are consequences of bilingualism that affect the native as well as the second language. The native language changes in response to second language use. The third is that the consequences of bilingualism are not limited to language but appear to reflect a reorganization of brain networks that hold implications for the ways in which bilinguals negotiate cognitive competition more generally. The focus of recent research on bilingualism has been to understand the relation between these discoveries and the implications they hold for language, cognition, and the brain across the lifespan.
Significance
Successful verbal communication requires the finely orchestrated interaction between production-based processes in the speaker’s brain and comprehension-based processes in the listener’s brain. Here we first develop a time-warping tool that enables us to map all brain areas reliably activated during the production of real-world speech. The results indicate that speech production is not localized to the left hemisphere but recruits an extensive bilateral network of linguistic and extralinguistic brain areas. We then directly compare the neural responses during speech production and comprehension and find that the two systems respond in similar ways. Our results argue that a shared neural mechanism supporting both production and comprehension facilitates communication and underline the importance of studying comprehension and production within unified frameworks.
Speech comprehension involves extensive use of prediction. Linguistic prediction may be guided by the semantics or syntax, but also by the performance characteristics of the speech signal, such as disfluency. Previous studies have shown that listeners, when presented with the filler uh, exhibit a disfluency bias for discourse-new or unknown referents, drawing inferences about the source of the disfluency. The goal of the present study is to study the contrast between native and non-native disfluencies in speech comprehension. Experiment 1 presented listeners with pictures of high-frequency (e.g., a hand) and low-frequency objects (e.g., a sewing machine) and with fluent and disfluent instructions. Listeners were found to anticipate reference to low-frequency objects when encountering disfluency, thus attributing disfluency to speaker trouble in lexical retrieval. Experiment 2 showed that, when participants listened to disfluent non-native speech, no anticipation of low-frequency referents was observed. We conclude that listeners can adapt their predictive strategies to the (non-native) speaker at hand, extending our understanding of the role of speaker identity in speech comprehension.
Humans unconsciously track a wide array of distributional characteristics in their sensory environment. Recent research in spoken-language processing has demonstrated that the speech rate surrounding a target region within an utterance influences which words, and how many words, listeners hear later in that utterance. On the basis of hypotheses that listeners track timing information in speech over long timescales, we investigated the possibility that the perception of words is sensitive to speech rate over such a timescale (e.g., an extended conversation). Results demonstrated that listeners tracked variation in the overall pace of speech over an extended duration (analogous to that of a conversation that listeners might have outside the lab) and that this global speech rate influenced which words listeners reported hearing. The effects of speech rate became stronger over time. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that neural entrainment by speech occurs on multiple timescales, some lasting more than an hour.
It is well known that multilingual speakers' nonnative productions are accented. Do these deviations from monolingual productions simply reflect the mislearning of nonnative sound categories, or can difficulties in processing speech sounds also contribute to a speaker's accent? Such difficulties are predicted by interactive theories of production, which propose that nontarget representations, partially activated during lexical access, influence phonetic processing. We examined this possibility using language switching, a task that is well known to disrupt multilingual speech production. We found that these disruptions extend to the articulation of individual speech sounds. When native Spanish speakers are required to unexpectedly switch the language of production between Spanish and English, their speech becomes more accented than when they do not switch languages (particularly for cognate targets). These findings suggest that accents reflect not only difficulty in acquiring second-language speech sounds but also the influence of representations partially activated during on-line speech processing.
Code-switching (CS) is central to many bilingual communities and, though linguistic and sociolinguistic research has characterised different types of code-switches (alternations, insertions, dense CS), the cognitive control processes (CPs) that mediate them are not well understood. A key issue is how during CS speakers produce the right words in the right order. In speech, serial order emerges from a speech plan in which items are represented in parallel. We propose that entry into the mechanism for speech planning (a competitive queuing mechanism) is governed by CPs best suited to the particular types of code-switches. Language task schemas external to the language network govern access. In CS, they are coordinated cooperatively and operate in a coupled or in an open control mode. The former permits alternations and insertions whereas the latter is required for dense CS. We explore predictions of this CP model and its implications for CS research.
This article introduces the P-chain, an emerging framework for theory in psycholinguistics that unifies research on comprehension, production and acquisition. The framework proposes that language processing involves incremental prediction, which is carried out by the production system. Prediction necessarily leads to prediction error, which drives learning, including both adaptive adjustment to the mature language processing system as well as language acquisition. To illustrate the P-chain, we review the Dual-path model of sentence production, a connectionist model that explains structural priming in production and a number of facts about language acquisition. The potential of this and related models for explaining acquired and developmental disorders of sentence production is discussed.
Mastering two languages has been associated with enhancement in human executive control, but previous studies of this phenomenon have exclusively relied on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual individuals. In the present study, we tested a single group of Welsh-English bilinguals engaged in a nonverbal conflict resolution task and manipulated language context by intermittently presenting words in Welsh, English, or both languages. Surprisingly, participants showed enhanced executive capacity to resolve interference when exposed to a mixed compared with a single language context, even though they ignored the irrelevant contextual words. This result was supported by greater response accuracy and reduced amplitude of the P300, an electrophysiological correlate of cognitive interference. Our findings introduce a new level of plasticity in bilingual executive control dependent on fast changing language context rather than long-term language experience.
The occurrence of codeswitching, or the seemingly random alternation of two languages both between and within sentences, has been shown (Gumperz, 1976; Pfaff, 1975; Wentz, 1977) to be governed not only by extralinguistic but also linguistic factors. For the balanced bilingual, codeswitching appears to be subject to an ‘equivalence constraint’ (Poplack, 1978): i.e. it tends to occur at points in discourse where juxtaposition of L1 and L2 elements does not violate a surface syntactic rule of either language. If correct, the equivalence constraint on codeswitching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability. It was hypothesized that equivalence would either be violated by non-fluent bilinguals, or that switch points which are ‘risky’ in terms of syntactic well-formedness (i.e. those which occur within a sentence) would tend to be avoided altogether. To test this hypothesis, I analysed the speech of 20 Puerto Rican residents of a stable bilingual community, exhibiting varying degrees of bilingual ability. Quantitative analysis of their switches revealed that both fluent and non-fluent bilinguals were able to code-switch frequently and still maintain grammaticality in both Lx and L2. While fluent bilinguals tended to switch at various syntactic boundaries within the sentence, non-fluent bilinguals favoured switching between sentences, allowing them to participate in the codeswitching mode, without fear of violating a grammatical rule of either of the languages involved. These results suggest that the codeswitching mode proceeds from that area of the bilingual's grammar where the surface structures of Lx and L2 overlap, and that codeswitching, rather than representing debasement of linguistic skill, is actually a sensitive indicator of bilingual ability.
Participants' eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instructions to click on a pictured object with a computer mouse (e.g., ''click on the net''). Participants were slower to éxate the target picture when the onset of the target word came from a competitor word (e.g., ne(ck)t) than from a nonword (e.g., ne(p)t), as predicted by models of spoken-word recognition that incorporate lexical competition. This was found whether the picture of the competitor word (e.g., the picture of a neck) was present on the display or not. Simulations with the TRACE model captured the major trends of éxations to the target and its competitor over time. We argue that eye movements provide a éne-grained measure of lexical activation over time, and thus reveal effects of lexical competition that are masked by response measures such as lexical decisions.
We report two experiments that investigate the effects of sentence context on bilingual lexical access in Spanish and English. Highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences in Spanish and English that included a marked word to be named. The word was either a cognate with similar orthography and/or phonology in the two languages, or a matched non-cognate control. Sentences appeared in one language alone (i.e., Spanish or English) and target words were not predictable on the basis of the preceding semantic context. In Experiment 1, we mixed the language of the sentence within a block such that sentences appeared in an alternating run in Spanish or in English. These conditions partly resemble normally occurring inter-sentential code-switching. In these mixed-language sequences, cognates were named faster than non-cognates in both languages. There were no effects of switching the language of the sentence. In Experiment 2, with Spanish-English bilinguals matched closely to those who participated in the first experiment, we blocked the language of the sentences to encourage language-specific processes. The results were virtually identical to those of the mixed-language experiment. In both cases, target cognates were named faster than non-cognates, and the magnitude of the effect did not change according to the broader context. Taken together, the results support the predictions of the Bilingual Interactive Activation + Model (Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2002) in demonstrating that bilingual lexical access is language non-selective even under conditions in which language-specific cues should enable selective processing. They also demonstrate that, in contrast to lexical switching from one language to the other, inter-sentential code-switching of the sort in which bilinguals frequently engage, imposes no significant costs to lexical processing.
Speech comprehension and production are governed by control processes. We explore their nature and
dynamics in bilingual speakers with a focus on speech production. Prior research indicates that
individuals increase cognitive control in order to achieve a desired goal. In the adaptive control
hypothesis we propose a stronger hypothesis: Language control processes themselves adapt to the
recurrent demands placed on them by the interactional context. Adapting a control process means
changing a parameter or parameters about the way it works (its neural capacity or efficiency) or the way
it works in concert, or in cascade, with other control processes (e.g., its connectedness). We distinguish
eight control processes (goal maintenance, conflict monitoring, interference suppression, salient cue
detection, selective response inhibition, task disengagement, task engagement, opportunistic planning).
We consider the demands on these processes imposed by three interactional contexts (single language,
dual language, and dense code-switching). We predict adaptive changes in the neural regions and circuits
associated with specific control processes. A dual-language context, for example, is predicted to lead to
the adaptation of a circuit mediating a cascade of control processes that circumvents a control dilemma.
Effective test of the adaptive control hypothesis requires behavioural and neuroimaging work that
assesses language control in a range of tasks within the same individual.
MacDonald (2013) proposes that comprehenders are sensitive to statistical patterns in their language input (Claim 1). These patterns are hypothesized to result from speakers' preferences in production, aggregated over the population (Claim 2). Production preferences are taken to be primarily determined by biases that serve production ease, thereby improving fluency (Claim 3). These three claims, together constituting the core of the PDC, are an ambitious endeavor to tie together several lines of research in psycholinguistics and linguistics. Here, I focus on the second and third claim, that it is predominantly “production ease,” rather than communicative pressures, that drives production preferences and hence language form (M, p. 13; cf. Bard et al., 2000; Ferreira and Dell, 2000; Arnold, 2008; Ferreira, 2008; Lam and Watson, 2010).
In contrast, I argue that production preferences and language form are unlikely to be understood without reference to communication. Specifically, production preferences are the result of at least two competing type of biases: biases toward production ease and biases toward ease, or at least success, of comprehension (Zipf, 1949). I refer to a weak version of the second type of bias as robust information transfer.1 Two hypotheses about how robust information transfer might affect production preferences are often conflated in the literature. First, speakers might continuously “estimate” their interlocutors' beliefs and structure their utterances based on these estimates. This claim, often referred to as audience design, is what production researchers (incl. M) tend to have in mind when they reject the idea that production preferences are affected by communicative biases. Many consider this claim implausible because production seems too demanding to allow additional computations (Ferreira, 2008). I share Tanenhaus's position that such intuitions are often misleading (Tanenhaus, 2013). Here, however, I pursue an alternative hypothesis, that communicative biases affect production preferences through learning and generalization across previous experiences (building on Jaeger and Ferreira, in press).
Language production processes can provide insight into how language comprehension works and language typology-why languages tend to have certain characteristics more often than others. Drawing on work in memory retrieval, motor planning, and serial order in action planning, the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account links work in the fields of language production, typology, and comprehension: (1) faced with substantial computational burdens of planning and producing utterances, language producers implicitly follow three biases in utterance planning that promote word order choices that reduce these burdens, thereby improving production fluency. (2) These choices, repeated over many utterances and individuals, shape the distributions of utterance forms in language. The claim that language form stems in large degree from producers' attempts to mitigate utterance planning difficulty is contrasted with alternative accounts in which form is driven by language use more broadly, language acquisition processes, or producers' attempts to create language forms that are easily understood by comprehenders. (3) Language perceivers implicitly learn the statistical regularities in their linguistic input, and they use this prior experience to guide comprehension of subsequent language. In particular, they learn to predict the sequential structure of linguistic signals, based on the statistics of previously-encountered input. Thus, key aspects of comprehension behavior are tied to lexico-syntactic statistics in the language, which in turn derive from utterance planning biases promoting production of comparatively easy utterance forms over more difficult ones. This approach contrasts with classic theories in which comprehension behaviors are attributed to innate design features of the language comprehension system and associated working memory. The PDC instead links basic features of comprehension to a different source: production processes that shape language form.
Linear mixed-effects models (LMEMs) have become increasingly prominent in psycholinguistics and related areas. However, many researchers do not seem to appreciate how random effects structures affect the generalizability of an analysis. Here, we argue that researchers using LMEMs for confirmatory hypothesis testing should minimally adhere to the standards that have been in place for many decades. Through theoretical arguments and Monte Carlo simulation, we show that LMEMs generalize best when they include the maximal random effects structure justified by the design. The generalization performance of LMEMs including data-driven random effects structures strongly depends upon modeling criteria and sample size, yielding reasonable results on moderately-sized samples when conservative criteria are used, but with little or no power advantage over maximal models. Finally, random-intercepts-only LMEMs used on within-subjects and/or within-items data from populations where subjects and/or items vary in their sensitivity to experimental manipulations always generalize worse than separate F1 and F2 tests, and in many cases, even worse than F1 alone. Maximal LMEMs should be the ‘gold standard’ for confirmatory hypothesis testing in psycholinguistics and beyond.
Until now, research on bilingual auditory word recognition has been scarce, and although most studies agree that lexical access is language-nonselective, there is less consensus with respect to the influence of potentially constraining factors. The present study investigated the influence of three possible constraints. We tested whether language nonselectivity is restricted by (a) a sentence context in a second language (L2), (b) the semantic constraint of the sentence, and (c) the native language of the speaker. Dutch–English bilinguals completed an English auditory lexical decision task on the last word of low- and high-constraining sentences. Sentences were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2, or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2. Interlingual homophones (e.g., lief “sweet” – leaf /liːf/) were always recognized more slowly than control words. The semantic constraint of the sentence and the native accent of the speaker modulated, but did not eliminate interlingual homophone effects. These results are discussed within language-nonselective models of lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition.
The perception of coarticulated speech as it unfolds over time was investigated by monitoring eye movements of participants as they listened to words with oral vowels or with late or early onset of anticipatory vowel nasalization. When listeners heard [CṼNC] and had visual choices of images of CVNC (e.g., send) and CVC (said) words, they fixated more quickly and more often on the CVNC image when onset of nasalization began early in the vowel compared to when the coarticulatory information occurred later. Moreover, when a standard eye movement programming delay is factored in, fixations on the CVNC image began to occur before listeners heard the nasal consonant. Listeners' attention to coarticulatory cues for velum lowering was selective in two respects: (a) listeners assigned greater perceptual weight to coarticulatory information in phonetic contexts in which [Ṽ] but not N is an especially robust property, and (b) individual listeners differed in their perceptual weights. Overall, the time course of perception of velum lowering in American English indicates that the dynamics of perception parallel the dynamics of the gestural information encoded in the acoustic signal. In real-time processing, listeners closely track unfolding coarticulatory information in ways that speed lexical activation.
In two experiments, we tested the role of lexical repetition, cognates, and second language (L2) proficiency in the priming of code-switches, using the structural priming technique. Dutch–English bilinguals repeated a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then described a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). Low- and high-proficient speakers of L2 English were tested in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. We found that the participants’ tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was influenced by lexical repetition between prime sentence and target picture and by the presence of a cognate in prime and target. A combined analysis showed that these lexical effects were stronger in the high-proficient than in the low-proficient L2 speakers. These results provide new insights into how language-related and speaker-related variables influence code-switching in sentences, and extend cognitive models of lexical and combinatorial processes in bilingual sentence production.
In this article the triggering hypothesis for codeswitching proposed by Michael Clyne is discussed and tested. According to this hypothesis, cognates can facilitate codeswitching of directly preceding or following words. It is argued that the triggering hypothesis in its original form is incompatible with language production models, as it assumes that language choice takes place at the surface structure of utterances, while in bilingual production models language choice takes place along with lemma selection. An adjusted version of the triggering hypothesis is proposed in which triggering takes place during lemma selection and the scope of triggering is extended to basic units in language production. Data from a Dutch–Moroccan Arabic corpus are used for a statistical test of the original and the adjusted triggering theory. The codeswitching patterns found in the data support part of the original triggering hypothesis, but they are best explained by the adjusted triggering theory.
Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase (Experiment 1b) and included a control Spanish monolingual group (Experiment 1a). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase (Experiment 2a) or in variable and complex sentences (Experiment 2b). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish (Experiment 1b) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers.
The past decade has seen an unprecedented growth in the study of language contact, associated partly with the linguistic effects of globalization and increased migration all over the world. Written by a leading expert in the field, this much-needed account brings together disparate findings to examine the dynamics of contact between languages in an immigrant context. Using data from a wide range of languages, including German, Dutch, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Croatian and Vietnamese, Michael Clyne discusses the dynamics of their contact with English. Clyne analyzes how and why these languages change in an immigration country like Australia, and asks why some languages survive longer than others. The book contains useful comparisons between immigrant vintages, generations, and between bilinguals and trilinguals. An outstanding contribution to the study of language contact, this book will be welcomed by students and researchers in linguistics, bilingualism, the sociology of language and education.
Three groups of native English speakers named words aloud in Spanish, their second language (L2). Intermediate proficiency learners in a classroom setting (Experiment 1) and in a domestic immersion program (Experiment 2) were compared to a group of highly proficient English–Spanish speakers. All three groups named cognate words more quickly and accurately than matched noncognates, indicating that all speakers experienced cross‐language activation during speech planning. However, only the classroom learners exhibited effects of cross‐language activation in their articulation: Cognate words were named with shorter overall durations, but longer (more English‐like) voice onset times. Inhibition of the first language during L2 speech planning appears to impact the stages of speech production at which cross‐language activation patterns can be observed.
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Is grammatical convergence between bilinguals’ two languages inevitable and does code-switching inherently promote it? Despite the burgeoning of bilingualism studies, this question—and even what should count as code-switching—remains contentious. Cumulative scientific advances will depend on attention to the social context in which bilingual phenomena arise, proper handling of spontaneous speech data, and consideration of the probabilistic constraints underlying occurrence rates of linguistic forms. We put forward this program of study as implemented in systematic quantitative analysis of linguistic structures in the New Mexico Spanish-English Bilingual (NMSEB) corpus. This unique compilation of bilingual speech by members of the Hispanic northern New Mexican community in the United States records both borrowing and—vitally—copious multi-word code-switching. Advancing the study of bilingualism is community-based data collection and accountable analysis of the linguistic conditioning of variation in both of the languages in contact as used by the bilinguals themselves, in comparison with appropriate benchmarks, again of both languages (monolingual, or earlier, varieties). The role of code-switching in convergence is evaluated through a novel on-line measure, comparisons based on the proximity of spontaneous use of the other language. Implementation of this test of proximate code-switching confirms a disjunction between bilinguals’ phonology, which is more labile, and morpho-syntax, which is stable. Variation is conditioned by intra-linguistic contextual features, the distribution of which, however, may shift under code-switching, shaping patterns in the bilingual community.
Growth Curve Analysis and Visualization Using R provides a practical, easy-to-understand guide to carrying out multilevel regression/growth curve analysis (GCA) of time course or longitudinal data in the behavioral sciences, particularly cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and psychology. With a minimum of statistical theory and technical jargon, the author focuses on the concrete issue of applying GCA to behavioral science data and individual differences.
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Bilingualism provides a unique opportunity for exploring hypotheses about how the human brain encodes language. For example, the “input switch” theory states that bilinguals can deactivate one language module while using the other. A new measure of spoken language comprehension, headband-mounted eyetracking, allows a firm test of this theory. When given spoken instructions to pick up an object, in a monolingual session, late bilinguals looked briefly at a distractor object whose name in the irrelevant language was initially phonetically similar to the spoken word more often than they looked at a control distractor object. This result indicates some overlap between the two languages in bilinguals, and provides support for parallel, interactive accounts of spoken word recognition in general.
The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish–English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical items with considerable phonological, semantic, and orthographic overlap (cognates) and lexical items with no phonological overlap with their English translation equivalents (non-cognates) were examined. The results indicate that there is a significant effect of cognate status in the Spanish production of VOT by Spanish–English bilinguals. These bilinguals produced /t/ with longer VOT values (more English-like) in the Spanish production of cognates compared to non-cognate words. It is proposed that the exemplar model of lexical representation (Bybee, 2001; Pierrehumbert, 2001) can be extended to include bilingual lexical connections by which cognates facilitate phonetic interference in the bilingual mental lexicon.
In this study, we test the hypothesis that code-switching leads to phonological convergence by examining Voice Onset Time (VOT) realization in the spontaneous code-switched speech of New Mexican Spanish-English bilinguals. We find that average VOT duration values in New Mexican Spanish fall within the range typical of non-contact varieties of the language, while New Mexican English displays VOT values in the low range of typical non-contact English. When we examine the VOT values of Spanish- and English-language words at varying degrees of proximity to code-switch points, we find a similar asymmetry. In Spanish, no effect of recent code-switching is evident. In English, conversely, close proximity to code-switch points results in a significant reduction in VOT values, i.e., in the direction of Spanish. We argue that while the data studied here do not directly demonstrate a causal connection between code-switching and long-term phonological convergence, they would not be inconsistent with such a view. We discuss a number of possible causes for the observed asymmetry between Spanish and English.
Bilinguals, i.e. those who use two languages in their everyday lives, move in and out of various speech modes when speaking to different interlocutors. When conversing with monolinguals, they speak one language and reduce the activation level of the other language, but when conversing with other bilinguals they choose a base language of interaction and often bring in the other language by either code-switching or borrowing. The aim of the present study is to explore how “guest words” (code-switches and borrowings) are processed by bilingual listeners when interacting with other bilinguals. Different types of English words (varying in phonotactic configuration and lexicon membership) were embedded in French sentences and were produced either as code-switches or borrowings. The gating paradigm (Grosjean, 1980) was used to present these words to French-English bilingual listeners so as to determine the role played by word type and language phonetics in the lexical access of guest words, as well as to uncover the underlying operations involved in the recognition process. Results showed that the phonotactics of a guest word, the presence or absence of a base language homophone, the language phonetics of the word, as well as the language that precedes the word, all play a role in the recognition process. An interactive activation view of bilingual word recognition is proposed to account for the results found in the study.
Two experiments with Chinese–English bilinguals were conducted to examine the recognition of code-switched words in speech. In Experiment 1, listeners were asked to identify a code-switched word in a sentence on the basis of increasing fragments of the word. In Experiment 2, listeners repeated the code-switched word following a predesignated point upon hearing the sentence. Converging evidence from these experiments shows that the successful recognition of code-switched words depends on the interaction among phonological, structural, and contextual information in the recognition process. The results also indicate that Chinese–English bilinguals can recognize code-switched words with the same amount of information as required by monolingual English listeners. These results are interpreted in terms of parallel activation and interactive processes in spoken word recognition.
In an experimental study of language switching and selection, bilinguals named numerals in either their first or second language unpredictably. Response latencies (RTs) on switch trials (where the response language changed from the previous trial) were slower than on nonswitch trials. As predicted, the language-switching cost was consistently larger when switching to the dominant L₁ from the weaker L₂ than vice versa such that, on switch trials, L₁ responses were slower than in L₂. This "paradoxical" asymmetry in the cost of switching languages is explained in terms of differences in relative strength of the bilingual's two languages and the involuntary persistence of the previous language set across an intended switch of language. Naming in the weaker language, L₂, requires active inhibition or suppression of the stronger competitor language, L₁; the inhibition persists into the following (switch) trial in the form of "negative priming" of the L₁ lexicon as a whole. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
We used a visual lexical decision task to explore control processes in proficient German–English bilinguals. Participants pressed a “yes” button if the letter string was a word in English and a “no” button if it was not. Our critical stimuli were interlingual homographs such as the low-frequency English word TAG. In German, TAG means “day” and is a relatively high frequency word. Overall, our participants responded more slowly to an interlingual homograph than to a control word matched to its English frequency. As we expected, the size of this interference effect depended on various factors. First, including “pure” German words in the stimulus list increased interference. However, participants were able to reduce the degree of interference over time even in the presence of such words. Second, in the absence of pure German words, informing participants about the presence of interlingual homographs from the start of the experimental trials allowed them to reduce interference. We examined the locus of these control effects by analysing carry-over, i.e., reaction times on word trials immediately following an interlingual homograph or its matched control. We inferred from the patterns of interference and carry-over that the primary locus for reducing interference is external to the bilingual lexico-semantic system. We consider the implications of these data for theories of control.
This paper aims to foster discussion of the means by which bilinguals control their two language systems. It proposes an inhibitory control (IC) model that embodies the principle that there are multiple levels of control. In the model a language task schema (modulated by a higher level of control) “reactively” inhibits potential competitors for production at the lemma level by virtue of their language tags. The IC model is used to expand the explanation of the effect of category blocking in translation proposed by Kroll and Stewart (1994), and predictions of the model are tested against other data. Its relationship to other proposals and models is considered and future directions proposed.
Grainger and Beauvillain (1987) found performance costs in the lexical decision task when bilingual participants switched languages in recognizing words. They also found that these costs could be eliminated by the use of language-specific orthographic cues. This led to the suggestion that switch costs arise from within the bilingual lexicon. An alternative account is that switch costs arise from outside the lexicon, a result of competition between control structures put in place to coordinate activation of the lexicon with task-appropriate responses (Green, 1998a, 1998b; Von Studnitz & Green, 1997). In Experiment 1 using English–French bilinguals, we showed that the apparent role of orthographic cues in Grainger and Beauvillain's study was probably due to a missing control condition. With this control condition in place, language-specific orthography did not reduce the switch cost. Two further experiments investigated the locus of the switch cost and found support for the notion that most of the switch cost originates from outside rather than inside the bilingual lexicon.
Four eye-tracking experiments examined lexical competition in non-native spoken-word recognition. Dutch listeners hearing English fixated longer on distractor pictures with names containing vowels that Dutch listeners are likely to confuse with vowels in a target picture name (pencil, given target panda) than on less confusable distractors (beetle, given target bottle). English listeners showed no such viewing time difference. The confusability was asymmetric: given pencil as target, panda did not distract more than distinct competitors. Distractors with Dutch names phonologically related to English target names (deksel, Ôlid,Õ given target desk) also received longer fixations than distractors with phonologically unrelated names. Again, English listeners showed no differential effect. With the materials translated into Dutch, Dutch listeners showed no activation of the English words (desk, given target deksel). The results motivate two conclusions: native phonemic categories capture second-language input even when stored representations maintain a second-language distinction; and lexical competition is greater for non-native than for native listeners.
Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language (within-language competition), the other language (between-language competition), or both languages at the same time (simultaneous competition) was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition in which no objects overlapped phonologically with the target. Results support previous findings of parallel activation of lexical items within and between languages, but suggest that the magnitude of the between-language competition effect may vary across first and second languages and may be mediated by a number of factors such as stimuli, language background, and language mode.