Bilingualism

Question 1

Does plasticity contribute?

Answer 1

Two theories:

1) Irreversible process of fine tuning to native phonemic contrasts
2) Reversible of Learning of phonemic contrasts causes shift in attention and processing strategies

Question 2

Evidence for critical period of language acquisition

Answer 2

Song learning in birds (doupe and kulhl 99); if don’t learn own song from adults during critical period will never learn it- there are different cut off points for perception and production.

• Cases of deprivation (eg Genie) but perceptual tests were not used, more language (and brain damage etc)
• Hearing impairments (Age of cochlear implant important)
• • Puberty changes perceptual ability!- maybe it is hormonal?

Question 3

Is there a critical period for L2 acquisition?

Answer 3

Harder to produce sounds of L2 because of attunement to native language and dominance of L1 accent, but NOT critical period ; more ‘sensitive period’

Question 4

Evidence for L2 acquisition? (italians)

Answer 4

Flege 99: Italians in canadian communities: AOL varied from 2-2 years, YOR also varied from 25-44 years- Accents were rated by native speakers: Large effect of age of arrival on accent but no clear critical period; plasticity loss is gradual and ‘spontaneous’ learning with eposure continues into adulthood

Question 5

Evidence for L2 acquisition? (Japanese)

Answer 5

Aoyama and flege 03: /r/ and /l/ distinction production in japanese people in the USA
compared ‘inexperienced’ (lived in USA for 2 years) and ‘experienced’ (20+)
Found distinction gets harder but not impossible – dependent on exposure

Question 6

Instances where bilingualism might occur?

Answer 6

parental background (1 or both), community and dominance of L1, language environment (nanny)

Question 7

How does bilingualism effect speech (lip) reading in infants?

Answer 7

Werker 2010: 3 french/english bis– watched people reading stories silently and habituated one way. Bilinguals remain able to distinguish by speech reading but monos do not.

Question 8

Do infants develop phonetic categories wihtin the same timeframe as monos or later?

Answer 8

Conflicting evidence! bilinguals attune to both auditory and visual: dominance is apparent from a young age and effects phonotactic learning. Garcia-Sierra 2011: ERP study showed ‘neural commitment’ at 15 months

Question 9

Does bilingualism effect developmental stages?

Answer 9

Half input than monolingual, always dominant in one and vocab score is always less.
Hoff 12: at 2;10 bis have same vocab as monos at 1;10 (as split in two- same across both languages)
Garcia-Sierra 11: different timetable for milestones; bis attune to both patterns but different time frames (although there is conflicting evidence)

Question 10

Does bilingualism give you a cognitive advantage? (For)

Answer 10

Brita 14: spanish-catalan (in spain) or spanish-english (in usa) vs mono controls
memory flexibility (ltm and working mem) is better at 18m for bi than mono or trilingual (unexpected!) 

Peal and lambert 1962:when SES controlled outperform on cognitive tasks

Kovacs and Mehler 09: 7m change in rule sysems- quicker to acknowledge change

Question 11

Does bilingualism give you a cognitive advantage? Bialystok

Answer 11

Bialystok 08: smaller vocab in L2, slower lexical retrieval and more ToT; but greater ability to suppress irrelevant info, adapt to changes and switch tasks and controlling attentional resources throughout life.
Better on Stroop task, dimension change card sort task, anti-saccade task, simon task.

Question 12

What is the Simon task?

Answer 12

Reaction times decrease if stimuli in same location as response even when irrelevant

Question 13

What about spatial interference?

Answer 13

Martinruee and bialystok 09: executive function advantage in bis at 4 years old and this continues until 50 y/o

Question 14

What effects L2 late acquisition?

Answer 14

1) language related factors (phoneme relations and phonetic complexities)
2) listener-related (age, exposure, skil/aptitude, motivation, formal training..)

Question 15

Languages can be very acoustically similar or different..

Answer 15

eg french /p/ is unaspirated– L1 dominance makes it harder to separate phonemes on this distinction

Question 16

But can’t late acquisition of L2 still become dominant?

Answer 16

Yes! Pallier 13; korean children adopted in france at age 3-8 and followed up in adulthood and could not recognise korean phrases and showed no extra brain activity

Question 17

How does age of L2 acquisition effect things?

Answer 17

sig relation between age of L2 acq and degree of foreign ccent as phonetic categories of L1 are harder to ignore (flege and mckay11)
Flege 97: on going use of L1 effects accent dominance in L2

Question 18

Can one be trained in a second language accent?

Answer 18

Yes- Bradlow 97; used intensive sessions of perceptual identification and feedback.
Lengeris and hazan 10: english vowel training for greeks: improve in noisy and quiet and noisy conditions

Question 19

Does method of training second lang phonemes matter?

Answer 19

No! Iverson, hazan 03: used exaggerated, perceptual fading and secondary cues and found all were equally as good by 15%
PERCEPTION TRANSFERS TO PRODUCTION but not vice versa (can produce it but not perceive)

Question 20

Distributional Learning (DL)

Answer 20

Werker 12: use leaning mechanism to become expert in native learning and very important in phonetic category learning– tracks relative frequency of phonetic tokens in input: doesn’t account for context.

Question 21

Where is bilingualism in the brain?

Answer 21

More likely to be in right hemisphere if acquired late (martin 98) - more dominant lang is lateralised before the less dominant (conboy 06)
Depending on acq age; Fabbro 2001: open and closed classes stored separately in early, and both stored together in late.

Question 22

Do similarities aid transition?

Answer 22

Yes Hartsuiker 04: italian-slovians; same grammar/ ‘shared syntax’ aids transition of l1 to l2

Question 23

Does being bilingual benefit cognition long term?

Answer 23

Yes Alladi 2013: large scale study about dementia onset- dementia is more preventable the more languages you speak.