Jorge R. Valdés Kroff

Juggling Two Languages in One Mind: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Language Processing and its Consequences for Cognition

Psycholinguistics has traditionally focused on language processing in monolingual speakers. In the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase of research on bilingual speakers, recognizing that bilingualism is not an unusual or problematic circumstance but one that characterizes more language speakers in the world than monolingualism. Most critically, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have come to see that understanding the way that bilinguals negotiate the presence of two languages in the mind and brain may reveal processes that are otherwise obscured in monolingual speakers. In this chapter, we review the new research on language processing in bilinguals. Our starting point is the observation that both languages are active when bilinguals intend to use one language alone. The parallel activation of the two languages creates competition across the two languages, which renders the bilingual a mental juggler. Surprisingly, the resolution of cross-language competition imposes relatively few processing costs to bilinguals because they appear to develop a high level of cognitive control that permits them to switch between the two languages and, at the same time, effectively select the intended language with few errors. The expertise that bilinguals develop in juggling the two languages has consequences for language processing, because both the native and second languages change as bilingual skill is acquired, and also for domain general cognitive processes, with the result that executive function is enhanced in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. We suggest that recent research on language and cognitive processing in bilinguals requires important revisions to models of language processing based on monolingual speakers alone. In this way, bilingualism is not only an interesting phenomenon in its own right, but an important tool for cognitive and language scientists.

WHEN GENDER AND LOOKING GO HAND IN HAND

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald ( 2007 ) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish proficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the first language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the less proficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing.

Chapter Seven – Juggling Two Languages in One Mind: What Bilinguals Tell Us About Language Processing and its Consequences for Cognition

Psycholinguistics has traditionally focused on language processing in monolingual speakers. In the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase of research on bilingual speakers, recognizing that bilingualism is not an unusual or problematic circumstance but one that characterizes more language speakers in the world than monolingualism. Most critically, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have come to see that understanding the way that bilinguals negotiate the presence of two languages in the mind and brain may reveal processes that are otherwise obscured in monolingual speakers. In this chapter, we review the new research on language processing in bilinguals. Our starting point is the observation that both languages are active when bilinguals intend to use one language alone. The parallel activation of the two languages creates competition across the two languages, which renders the bilingual a mental juggler. Surprisingly, the resolution of cross-language competition imposes relatively few processing costs to bilinguals because they appear to develop a high level of cognitive control that permits them to switch between the two languages and, at the same time, effectively select the intended language with few errors. The expertise that bilinguals develop in juggling the two languages has consequences for language processing, because both the native and second languages change as bilingual skill is acquired, and also for domain general cognitive processes, with the result that executive function is enhanced in bilinguals relative to monolinguals. We suggest that recent research on language and cognitive processing in bilinguals requires important revisions to models of language processing based on monolingual speakers alone. In this way, bilingualism is not only an interesting phenomenon in its own right, but an important tool for cognitive and language scientists.

Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing

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.

Mixing things up: How blocking and mixing affect the processing of codemixed sentences

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: The goal of this study is to determine if the way in which codemixed sentences are presented during experimental lab sessions affects the way they are processed, and how experimental design approximates (or not) patterns of language use in bilingual populations. Design/methodology/approach: An eye-tracking study was conducted comparing reading times on codemixed and unilingual Spanish sentences across two modes of presentation: (a) a blocked mode, where one block contained unilingual Spanish sentences and another one contained codemixed sentences; and (b) a mixed mode, where both unilingual and codemixed sentences were mixed together in a randomized fashion. Data and analysis: 20 heritage speakers of Spanish were tested. Four reading measures extracted from the eye-tracking data were subjected to linear mixed-effects regression, with significance determined via backwards likelihood ratio tests, to examine differences across modes of presentation. Findings/conclusions: Codemixes took significantly longer to process in the blocked mode than in the mixed mode. This is in line with corpus data suggesting that intra-sentential codemixing does not occur for long stretches of time and is broken up by unilingual discourse. Originality: While a few studies have hinted at the potential confounds related to the presentation of codemixed or language-switching stimuli, the direct effects of experimental manipulation coupled with insights from sociolinguistic or corpus-based studies have not been tested. Significance/implications: To better understand bilingual codemixing, as well as the cost (or lack thereof) associated with it, lab-based studies of codemixing should take insights from sociolinguistic and corpus-based research. The results of this study suggest that the experience that participants bring into the lab can interact with experimental design and result in unexpected results.