Emanuel Bylund

Dominant-Language Replacement: The Case of International Adoptees.

This article challenges a recent proposal for the theoretical interpretation of L1 and L2 interaction that results from the abrupt change of language environment in internationally adopted children. According to this proposal (Pallier, Dehaene, Poline, LeBihan, Argenti, Depoux and Mehler, 2003; Ventureyra, Pallier and Yoo, 2004), such children experience a total loss of their L1, while, as adults, they exhibit a nativelike ultimate attainment of their L2. These authors suggest that what they see as a total loss of L1 allows a resetting of the neural network that normally subserves L1 retention and hence permits a complete acquisition of the L2. Data from two of our own research projects, one on L1 remnants in Korean adoptees in Sweden (see Park, forthcoming), and the other on age of acquisition and ultimate L2 attainment of Swedish (see Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam, in press), which included data from Latin American adoptees in Sweden among other participants, suggest (i) that L1 remnants are indeed maintained, (ii) that L2 attainment is not enhanced by severe L1 attrition, and (iii) that there is an age dimension to both the degree of L1 attrition and the level of L2 ultimate attainment in international adoptees. We therefore contend that a maturational interpretation of language replacement data is preferable.

Effects of age of L2 acquisition on L1 event conceptualization patterns

This study explores the effects that the age of onset (AO) of second language (L2) acquisition exerts on the attrition of first language (L1) event conceptualization patterns. The subjects studied ...

Does grammatical aspect affect motion event cognition? A cross-linguistic comparison of English and Swedish speakers

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

Does First Language Maintenance Hamper Nativelikeness in a Second Language?: A Study of Ultimate Attainment in Early Bilinguals.

Within the field of SLA, the incidence of nativelikeness in second language (L2) speakers has typically been explained as a function of age of acquisition. An alternative interpretation, however, i ...

Two Languages, Two Minds Flexible Cognitive Processing Driven by Language of Operation

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Language and thought in a multilingual context: the case of isiXhosa

Situated within the grammatical aspect approach to motion event cognition, this study takes a first step in investigating language and thought in functional multilinguals by studying L1 isiXhosa speakers living in South Africa. IsiXhosa being a non-aspect language, the study investigates how the knowledge and use of additional languages with grammatical aspect influence cognition of endpoint-oriented motion events among L1 isiXhosa speakers. Results from a triads-matching task show that participants who often used aspect languages and had greater exposure to English in primary education were less prone to rely on endpoints when categorising motion events.

The Effects of Heritage Language Instruction on First Language Proficiency: A Psycholinguistic Perspective

Abstract This study investigates the effects of weekly heritage language (HL) classes on first language (L1) proficiency in speakers who arrived in the second language (L2)-dominant setting before the onset of puberty. Two groups of L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilingual high school students living in Sweden participated in the study. One group currently attended HL classes once a week, whereas the other group was no longer doing so. The two groups did not differ with regard to the total number of years of HL class attendance, age of arrival in Sweden, length of residence or degree of L1 contact. Results from a grammaticality judgement test and a cloze test showed that the group that currently attended HL classes outperformed the non-attending group. Using a framework that emphasises heightened attrition susceptibility among speakers who lost contact with the L1-dominant setting before puberty, the study suggests that HL classes function as a factor that, all other things being equal, may counterweigh attrition susceptibility. Moreover, it is suggested that the effects of HL classes on L1 proficiency are short term rather than long term. That is to say, once attendance ceases the counterweighing effect is less visible.

Segmentation and temporal structuring of events in early Spanish-Swedish bilinguals

The aim of this study is to examine patterns of segmentation and temporal structuring of events in early bilinguals. The participant group consists of 25 L1 Spanish — L2 Swedish adult bilinguals residing in Sweden, with ages of L2 acquisition ranging from 1 to 11 years. There were 15 native speakers of Swedish and 15 native speakers of Spanish engaged as monolingual controls. The participants provided online-retellings in both languages of an excerpt from the film Modern Times. The bilinguals’ L1 and L2 retellings were compared with those of the monolingual speakers of the respective languages. The results indicated that the bilinguals resorted to the same event segmentation strategies in both L1 and L2, opting for an intermediate degree of event resolution. This behavior fell in between the monolingual Spanish high degree of resolution and the monolingual Swedish low degree of resolution. As for temporal structuring patterns, the results showed that the bilinguals in their L2 converged with the Swedish monolingual controls, linking the events by means of anaphoric adverbials (i.e., ‘x then y’). The bilinguals also converged with the Spanish-speaking controls in their L1 perspectivation patterns, as both groups left the temporal relation between the events to be inferred and focused on ongoingness (i.e., now x, now y). These findings are discussed in terms of convergence and co-existence of conceptual patterns (Pavlenko, 1999, 2008).

The irreversibility of sensitive period effects in language development: evidence from second language acquisition in international adoptees.

The question of a sensitive period in language acquisition has been subject to extensive research and debate for more than half a century. While it has been well established that the ability to learn new languages declines in early years, the extent to which this outcome depends on biological maturation in contrast to previously acquired knowledge remains disputed. In the present study, we addressed this question by examining phonetic discriminatory abilities in early second language (L2) speakers of Swedish, who had either maintained their first language (L1) (immigrants) or had lost it (international adoptees), using native speaker controls. Through this design, we sought to disentangle the effects of the maturational state of the learner on L2 development from the effects of L1 interference: if additional language development is indeed constrained by an interfering L1, then adoptees should outperform immigrant speakers. The results of an auditory lexical decision task, in which fine vowel distinctions in Swedish had been modified, showed, however, no difference between the L2 groups. Instead, both L2 groups scored significantly lower than the native speaker group. The three groups did not differ in their ability to discriminate non-modified words. These findings demonstrate that L1 loss is not a crucial condition for successfully acquiring an L2, which in turn is taken as support for a maturational constraints view on L2 acquisition. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/1J9X50aePeU.

The Whorfian time warp: Representing duration through the language hourglass.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. The precise impact of language on duration representation is, however, unknown. Here, we show that language can have a powerful role in transforming humans’ psychophysical experience of time. Contrary to the universalist account, we found language-specific interference in a duration reproduction task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth. When reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. These patterns conform to preferred expressions of duration magnitude in these languages (Swedish: long/short time; Spanish: much/small time). Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language context. Such shifting behavior within the same individual reveals hitherto undocumented levels of flexibility in time representation. Finally, contrary to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. These results reveal the malleable nature of human time representation as part of a highly adaptive information processing system.