Mikel Santesteban

How do highly proficient bilinguals control their lexicalization process? Inhibitory and language-specific selection mechanisms are both functional.

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in language-switching contexts involving (a) the 2nd language (L2) and the L3 of the bilinguals, (b) the L3 and the L4, and (c) the L1 and a recently learned new language. Highly proficient bilinguals showed symmetrical switching costs regardless of the age at which the L2 was learned and of the similarities of the 2 languages and asymmetrical switching costs when 1 of the languages involved in the switching task was very weak (an L4 or a recently learned language). The theoretical implications of these results for the attentional mechanisms used by highly proficient bilinguals to control their lexicalization process are discussed.

On the facilitatory effects of cognate words in bilingual speech production

There is a growing body of evidence showing that a words cognate status is an important dimension affecting the naming performance of bilingual speakers. In a recent article, Kohnert extended this observation to the naming performance of an aphasic bilingual (DJ). DJ named pictures with cognate names more accurately than pictures with non-cognate names. Furthermore, having named the pictures in Spanish helped the subsequent retrieval (with a delay of one week between the two tests) of the same pictures names in English, but only for pictures with cognate names. That is, there was a language transfer but only for those translation words that were phonologically similar. In this article we first evaluate the conclusions drawn from these results by Kohnert, and second we discuss the theoretical implications of the facilitatory effects of cognate words for models of speech production in bilingual speakers.

Bilingual word perception and production: two sides of the same coin?

In their recent review [1], French and Jacquet refer tothe process of ‘finding the right word in the rightcontext’ as lexical access. As they note, the processesinvolved in lexical access are especially complex forbilingual speakers, because in addition to activation ofwords other than the target, other languages might beactivated as well. In attempting to resolve this issueFrench and Jacquet conflate two different processingmodalities: word recognition and production. However,theissueofthesimultaneous activationofthetwolexiconsof a bilingual might have different answers in eachmodality [2].In word recognition, language membership is par-tially encoded in the input stimulus itself (e.g. it isphonologically encoded). Therefore, given its bottom-upnature it is likely that visual word recognition involvesthe activation of all representations that matchcompletely (as in the case of interlingual homographspain) or partially the input signal, regardless of thelanguage to which they belong (but see [3]). However,in word production, it is the speaker who intentionallychooses the target language, and therefore in principlethe speaker can exert some control on which represen-tations are activated according to the communicativecontext. This is not to say that the dynamics ofactivation flow must be different in recognition andproduction, but rather that the nature of the processesinvolved in each are different enough to warrantcaution in exporting assumptions from one modalityto the other without independent motivation.Perhaps because of the conflation of the twomodalities the discussion of French and Jacquetabout the selectivity of the lexical selection mechanismis confusing. If the two lexicons of a bilingual areactivated in word production, lexical selection needs toinvolve some sort of language-specific mechanism(whether such a mechanism allows for cross-languagecompetition or not is a different issue [4,5]). The IC(inhibitory control) model achieves this by ‘selectively’inhibiting words of the non-response language [6,7],whereas other models do so either by creating a‘selective’ imbalance in the activation sent by thesemantic system to the lexical system [8],orby‘selectively’ ignoring the activation of the non-responselanguage [5,9]. Thus, it is unclear what the authorsmean when they say that inhibitory mechanisms of theIC are not language-specific. In word production, itseems that all models that allow non-selective acti-vation do postulate some sort of language-specificselection mechanism.Speech production and perception need not followdifferent processing principles, but these two modalitiesaredifferentenoughfor usnot totreat themas twosidesofthe same coin.

The impact of early bilingualism on controlling a language learned late: an ERP study

This study asks whether early bilingual speakers who have already developed a language control mechanism to handle two languages control a dominant and a late acquired language in the same way as late bilingual speakers. We therefore, compared event-related potentials in a language switching task in two groups of participants switching between a dominant (L1) and a weak late acquired language (L3). Early bilingual late learners of an L3 showed a different ERP pattern (larger N2 mean amplitude) as late bilingual late learners of an L3. Even though the relative strength of languages was similar in both groups (a dominant and a weak late acquired language), they controlled their language output in a different manner. Moreover, the N2 was similar in two groups of early bilinguals tested in languages of different strength. We conclude that early bilingual learners of an L3 do not control languages in the same way as late bilingual L3 learners –who have not achieved native-like proficiency in their L2– do. This difference might explain some of the advantages early bilinguals have when learning new languages.

Assessing the presence of lexical competition across languages: Evidence from the Stroop task

Do the lexical representations of the non-response language enter into lexical competition during speech production? This issue has been studied by means of the picture–word interference paradigm in which two paradoxical effects have been observed. The so-called CROSS-LANGUAGE IDENTITY EFFECT (Costa, Miozzo and Caramazza, 1999) has been taken as evidence against cross-linguistic lexical competition. In contrast, the so-called PHONO-TRANSLATION EFFECT (Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot and Schreuder, 1998) has been interpreted as revealing lexical competition across languages. In this article, we assess the reliability of these two effects by testing Spanish–Catalan highly-proficient bilinguals performing a Stroop task. The results of the experiment are clear: while the cross-language identity facilitation effect is reliably replicated, the phono-translation interference effect is absent from the Stroop task. From these results, we conclude that we should be cautious when drawing strong conclusions about the presence of competition across languages based on the phono-translation effect observed in the picture–word interference paradigm.

The control of speech production by bilingual speakers: Introductory remarks

How much would Bill Murray have liked to be able to speak Japanese! Bill Murrays character in the movie Lost in Translation exemplifies the way we feel when trying to communicate with someone that does not speak the same language. Often, in such cases, the exchange of information is disrupted and even translation does not seem to capture the communicative intention of the interlocutors. Thus, to be able to speak two languages at will is obviously a worthy skill to have. However, there is also a potential drawback, namely, bilingual speakers need to control their production in such a way that the two languages do not end up mixed in an inappropriate manner during the discourse. For example, if Bill Murray would have been an English–Japanese bilingual, he would have had to be careful not to use English words when speaking to the director of the commercial. This poses interesting problems to researchers in cognitive psychology: How does a bilingual speaker control her two languages during speech production? How do bilingual speakers manage to avoid massive interference from the language they are not using? What is the role of the language-not-in-use during lexical retrieval and phonological encoding? The articles included in this issue aim at discussing the answers that have been put forward to some of these questions.

Phi-features reloaded: An event-related potential study on person and number agreement processing

Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number, but are these different phi-features processed distinctly or similarly? We used a sentence grammaticality task to explore the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject–verb person and number phi-feature agreement violations. We generated grammatical structures (grammatical control) and ungrammatical structures in which the verb disagreed with the subject in person (person violation), in number (number violation), or in both person and number features (person+number violation). Behavioral data revealed that, overall, participants were faster and more accurate detecting person and person+number violations than violations involving only number. Event-related potential responses revealed a N400–P600 pattern for all violation types. Person and person+number violations elicited larger P600 effects than number violations. These findings reveal different costs related to the processing of person and number phi-feature agreement and indicate that these features are distinct components of agreement computation.

Aiming at shorter dependencies: the role of agreement morphology

This study examined word order preferences as a function of phrasal length in Basque. Basque is an OV language with flexible sentence word order and rich verb agreement. Contrary to the universal short-before-long preference predicted by availability models, Hawkins has argued that short-before-long orders are preferred in VO languages such as English, whereas long-before-short orders are preferred in OV languages such as Japanese. However, it is unclear how length affects word order preferences when an OV language has rich verb agreement and allows post-verbal arguments. We found a general long-before-short preference, and a tendency to place the verb in a sentence-medial position when one constituent is long. We argue that since agreement morphology signals the thematic role and case of surrounding phrases, it contributes to speeding up sentence processing. We conclude that morphologically rich languages employ both general adjacency mechanisms and language-specific resources to enhance language efficiency.

Pronoun preferences of children in a language without typical third-person pronouns

This study presents comprehension data from 6–7-and 8–10-year-old children as well as adults on the acceptability of null vs overt anaphoric forms (the demonstrative hura ‘that’ and the quasipronoun bera ‘(s)he, him-/herself’) in Basque, a language without true third-person pronouns. In an acceptability judgement task, a developmental change occurred in the preference for hura (Experiment 1): 6–7-year-olds showed a preference for the null pronoun in both topic-shift and topic-continuity contexts, while 8–10-year-olds, like adults, preferred hura in topic-shift contexts and null pronouns in topic-continuity contexts. However, no developmental shift was observed in the preference for bera (Experiment 2): unlike adults, neither 6–7 nor 8–10-year-old children selected bera over null pronouns in topic-shift contexts. They instead showed a general preference for null pronouns, an indication of tolerance for ambiguity – a pattern which differs from prior studies in other null-subject languages, where ambiguous pronouns declined with age. The results reveal a different developmental pattern for hura and bera, which may be explained by the more rigid (syntactic) constraints operating on hura in comparison to bera in antecedent choice.

Effects of case-marking and head position on language production? Evidence from an ergative OV language

How ease of access to semantic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic information affects constituent structure selection has been investigated exclusively in nominative/accusative head-initial (VO) languages. We investigated whether these findings can be generalised to ergative head-final (OV) languages like Basque. Using the structural priming paradigm, we studied Basque native speakers’ choice of description of events involving psychological-verbs (intransitive [NPABS-PP-VPSYCH] vs. transitive [NPERG-NPABS-VPSYCH] structures). Experiment 1 showed structural priming and lexical boost effects: more intransitive [NPABS-PP-VPSYCH] descriptions produced after intransitive [NPABS-PP-VPSYCH] than transitive [NPERG-NPABS-VPSYCH] primes, and stronger effects with verb repetition. Experiment 3 showed that structural similarity between prime and target enhances priming. Finally, Experiments 2 and 4 revealed no case-marking repetition boost effects to structural priming: intransitive [NPABS-PP-VPSYCH] structures were equally primed by intransitive structures with absolutive-marked ([NPABS-VINTR]) or ergative-marked ([NPERG-VINTR]) subjects. We conclude that sentence production is verb-based in both VO and OV languages, and that case-marking occurs after structural selection.