Week 3 RF-Bilingualism Flashcards
What is bilingualism?
“The regular use of two or more languages (or dialects), and bilinguals are those people who use two or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives”. François Grosjean (2008).
Different from being a native speaker of two languages! e.g., 2 parents who speak different languages, moving to a new country etc.,
How is bilingualism everywhere?
~ 6000 languages for ~ 190 independent countries.
EU (2012): 54% general population and 78% students can speak another language.
Acquisition contexts: simultaneous or sequential.
Variation in the AoA, practice, proficiency, exposure, usage, motivation,
etc.
Define Language Processing
Different levels of linguistic representation (words, phonemes,
etc.) + combinatorial rules
What are separate store models?
“Separate store models” propose separate lexicons for each
language (e.g., Potter et al, 1984). –> inspired by neuropsychological cases (selective language recovery i.e., just recovered one, in stroke patients - Pitres, A. (1895)). Strong evidence against these models comes from studies that have shown that the two languages are co-activated and compete for selection (e.g., Spivey and Marian, 1999; Costa & Caramazza, 1999; Costa et al., 2000)
What are common store models?
“Common store models” propose a shared lexicon between languages and a shared semantic memory system. (Green, 1998;
Costa et al., 2005)–> The majority of current models of the bilingual language system are based on this. Largely supported by evidence from neuroimaging,
psycholinguistics as well as patient studies (e.g., acquired language impairments due to
stroke, traumatic brain injury and dementia).
What evidence are there for separate lexicons? (Kim et al., 1997)
Sentence generation task: Distinct activation in Broca’s area for
covert production of two different languages.
-Asked to do same task in both their native and non-native language
-Found activation in the frontal gyrus area
-If you learn the languages at separate times, you are likely going to have these languages stored in different areas of the brain
-HOWEVER, only had 6 participants
What evidence are there for shared lexicons? (Costa & Caramazza, 1999)
-Spanish-English bilinguals naming pictures in Spanish (L1) with distractors (semantically similar) in Spanish (L1) and in English (L2).
-Wanted to see if when naming a picture in a given language, you activate the 2 representations
Semantic interference does not depend on the language of the
distractor. The semantic interference effect occurs when the language of the disruptor is the same as the picture
What was found in the Meta-analysis study: L1 and L2 naming? (Indefrey, 2006)
L2 > L1 in late AoA, low proficiency, low exposure bilinguals.
Differences in BA 44, 47 L&R inferior frontal gyrus
Age of acquisition (AoA), proficiency, and exposure: do
they affect the organization of the bilingual mental lexicon?
Converging behavioural and neuroimaging evidence for strong
effects of AoA, proficiency and usage/exposure.
Less fluently spoken languages trigger more activity than well-
mastered languages.
Differences are seen in regions that respond to processing
difficulty and selection, across a range of tasks and domains.
What is the “hard problem”: selecting the right word in the right language? (Costa et al., 2000)
Parallel activation of the two languages (i.e., occurs at the same time): example from Spanish-Catalan bilinguals naming (cognate and non-cognate) pictures in Spanish.
-Cognate words refers to phonemes or representations that are shared in languages e.g., gat spanish and gato catalan)
-Non-cognate words refer to words which are similar in meaning but differ in phonemes
-Faster reaction times for the retrieval of cognate words over non-cognate words
Language-specific selection models: What is the concept selection account?
The target language is specified at the conceptual level (pre-verbal message).
No parallel activation and no cross-language competition.
Language-specific selection models: What is the language specific selection account?
The target language is selected at the lexical level.
Parallel activation, but no cross-
language competition.
What is the Inhibitory Control model (Language-non specific selection)?
-Explains how bilinguals resolve the hard problem
The target language is selected by applying reactive inhibitory control (IC) to the non-target language (via language task schemas)
IC is proportional to the strength of the language (L1 needs to be
inhibited more strongly than the L2)
IC is applied to all the non-target
lexical representations (global
inhibition)
IC is a domain-general mechanism.
What are the predictions the Inhibitory Control model (Language-non specific selection)?
Cross-language competition proportional to the strength of the language (strong interference from L1 when using L2)
Transfer effects from language control to domain-general cognitive control (e.g., bilingual
advantage)
What evidence is there for inhibitory control model? Language switching (Meuter and Allport, 1999)
-Digit colour indicates the language in which it has to be named
-Switch cost: switch vs unswitch (i.e., when naming a language in your native language e.g., spanish, you switch off the english knowledge. But when you need to name a number in english, you have to find the information you just suppressed to measure the efforts participants have to deal with to recover from inhibition)
-Slower reaction times with switch trials compared to non-switch trials
However Asymmetrical switch costs are not consistently observed (see Costa et al., 2004, 2006)
Rather than reflecting persisting inhibition, switch cost asymmetries may reflect the need to strongly activate the weaker of the two languages (see Branzi et al., 2014; 2020)
