Simone Sprenger

An ERP study on L2 syntax processing: When do learners fail?

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) can reveal online processing differences between native speakers and second language (L2) learners during language comprehension. Using the P600 as a measure of native-likeness, we investigated processing of grammatical gender agreement in highly proficient immersed Romance L2 learners of Dutch. We demonstrate that these late learners consistently fail to show native-like sensitivity to gender violations. This appears to be due to a combination of differences from the gender marking in their L1 and the relatively opaque Dutch gender system. We find that L2 use predicts the effect magnitude of non-finite verb violations, a relatively regular and transparent construction, but not that of gender agreement violations. There were no effects of age of acquisition, length of residence, proficiency or offline gender knowledge. Additionally, a within-subject comparison of stimulus modalities (written vs. auditory) shows that immersed learners may show some of the effects only in the auditory modality; in non-finite verb violations, an early native-like N400 was only present for auditory stimuli. However, modality failed to influence the response to gender. Taken together, the results confirm the persistent problems of Romance learners of Dutch with online gender processing and show that they cannot be overcome by reducing task demands related to the modality of stimulus presentation.

Pupil Dilation Co-Varies with Memory Strength of Individual Traces in a Delayed Response Paired-Associate Task

Studies on cognitive effort have shown that pupil dilation is a reliable indicator of memory load. However, it is conceivable that there are other sources of effort involved in memory that also affect pupil dilation. One of these is the ease with which an item can be retrieved from memory. Here, we present the results of an experiment in which we studied the way in which pupil dilation acts as an online marker for memory processing during the retrieval of paired associates while reducing confounds associated with motor responses. Paired associates were categorized into sets containing either 4 or 7 items. After learning the paired associates once, pupil dilation was measured during the presentation of the retrieval cue during four repetitions of each set. Memory strength was operationalized as the number of repetitions (frequency) and set-size, since having more items per set results in a lower average recency. Dilation decreased with increased memory strength, supporting the hypothesis that the amplitude of the evoked pupillary response correlates positively with retrieval effort. Thus, while many studies have shown that “memory load” influences pupil dilation, our results indicate that the task-evoked pupillary response is also sensitive to the experimentally manipulated memory strength of individual items. As these effects were observed well before the response had been given, this study also suggests that pupil dilation can be used to assess an item’s memory strength without requiring an overt response.

Grammatical workspace sharing during language production and language comprehension: Evidence from grammatical multitasking

Grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding (in sentence production and comprehension, respectively) are often portrayed as independent modalities of grammatical performance that only share declarative resources: lexicon and grammar. The processing resources subserving these modalities are supposed to be distinct. In particular, one assumes the existence of two workspaces where grammatical structures are assembled and temporarily maintained—one for each modality. An alternative theory holds that the two modalities share many of their processing resources and postulates a single mechanism for the online assemblage and short-term storage of grammatical structures: a shared workspace. We report two experiments with a novel “grammatical multitasking” paradigm: the participants had to read (i.e., decode) and to paraphrase (encode) sentences presented in fragments, responding to each input fragment as fast as possible with a fragment of the paraphrase. The main finding was that grammatical constraints with respect to upcoming input that emanate from decoded sentence fragments are immediately replaced by grammatical expectations emanating from the structure of the corresponding paraphrase fragments. This evidences that the two modalities have direct access to, and operate upon, the same (i.e., token-identical) grammatical structures. This is possible only if the grammatical encoding and decoding processes command the same, shared grammatical workspace. Theoretical implications for important forms of grammatical multitasking—self-monitoring, turn-taking in dialogue, speech shadowing, and simultaneous translation—are explored.

The impact of language co-activation on L1 and L2 speech fluency

Fluent speech depends on the availability of well-established linguistic knowledge and routines for speech planning and articulation. A lack of speech fluency in late second-language (L2) learners may point to a deficiency of these representations, due to incomplete acquisition. Experiments on bilingual language processing have shown, however, that there are strong reasons to believe that multilingual speakers experience co-activation of the languages they speak. We have studied to what degree language co-activation affects fluency in the speech of bilinguals, comparing a monolingual German control group with two bilingual groups: 1) first-language (L1) attriters, who have fully acquired German before emigrating to an L2 English environment, and 2) immersed L2 learners of German (L1: English). We have analysed the temporal fluency and the incidence of disfluency markers (pauses, repetitions and self-corrections) in spontaneous film retellings. Our findings show that learners to speak more slowly than controls and attriters. Also, on each count, the speech of at least one of the bilingual groups contains more disfluency markers than the retellings of the control group. Generally speaking, both bilingual groups-learners and attriters-are equally (dis)fluent and significantly more disfluent than the monolingual speakers. Given that the L1 attriters are unaffected by incomplete acquisition, we interpret these findings as evidence for language competition during speech production.

A bilingual advantage in task switching? Age-related differences between German monolinguals and Dutch-Frisian bilinguals

This study investigated whether lifelong bilingualism can be associated with enhanced executive control, particularly mental flexibility, and with a modulation of an age-related decline in these functions. We compared performance of middle-aged and elderly speakers of German and bilingual speakers of Dutch and Frisian in a cued task-switching paradigm. All bilinguals were fluent in the same, closely-related language pairs. Bilinguals incurred significantly lower switching costs than monolinguals, and elderly bilinguals were less affected by an age-related increase in switching costs than monolinguals. Bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the size of the mixing costs. Our findings suggest that lifelong bilingualism correlates with enhanced ability to shift between mental sets, as well as increased resistance to proactive interference. The fact that we found significant group differences – while some previous studies did not – may be attributable to the choice of our task and to the cognateness of the languages involved.

L2 immersion causes non-native-like L1 pronunciation in German attriters

According to Flege׳s Speech Learning Model, the speech sounds of a bilingual׳s languages are contained in one common phonological space. This predicts bidirectional influence on the articulation of these speech sounds. We investigated the influence of a late-learned second language (L2) on the first language (L1) in a group of German L1 attriters in Anglophone North America (i.e., long-term emigrants in L2 immersion). These speakers were compared to a control group of monolingual German L1 speakers in two analyses: First, L1 speech samples of both groups were rated for native-likeness. Attriters sounded less native-like to raters, with 40% of the attriters rated below the monolingual range. Native-likeness was negatively associated with length of residence abroad and positively associated with L1 use. Second, formant analyses on four speech sounds of German—/aː/, /ɛ/, /ɔ/ and /l/—were conducted for attriters and controls. For these analyses, two attriter subgroups were formed: one with speakers who sounded native-like to raters and one with speakers who did not. It was hypothesised that the formants in both groups would shift in the direction of similar L2 speech sounds and that the shift would be stronger in non-native-like attriters. The first hypothesis was partly confirmed: At least one attriter group differed from the control group on one formant of /aː/ and /l/. These differences were consistent with predictions based on the L2. The second hypothesis was not confirmed: There was no evidence that the formants of the non-native-like attriters deviated more strongly from the monolingual baseline than those of the native-like attriters. Additionally, the formant values and the ratings were found to be only weakly associated, suggesting a different source of the perceptibly non-native-like pronunciation in some attriters.

Prolonged L2 immersion engenders little change in morphosyntactic processing of bilingual natives

Bilingual and monolingual language processing differ, presumably because of constant parallel activation of both languages in bilinguals. We attempt to isolate the effects of parallel activation in a group of German first-language (L1) attriters, who have grown up as monolingual natives before emigrating to an L2 environment. We hypothesized that prolonged immersion will lead to changes in the processing of morphosyntactic violations. Two types of constructions were presented as stimuli in an event-related potential experiment: (1) verb form combinations (auxiliaries+past participles and modals+infinitives) and (2) determiner–noun combinations marked for grammatical gender. L1 attriters showed the same response to violations of gender agreement as monolingual controls (i.e. a significant P600 effect strongest over posterior electrodes). Incorrect verb form combinations also elicited a significant posterior P600 effect in both groups. In attriters, however, there was an additional posterior N400 effect for this type of violation. Such biphasic patterns have been found before in L1 and L2 speakers of English and might reflect the influence of this language. Generally, we interpret our results as evidence for the stability of the deeply entrenched L1 system, even in the face of L2 interference.

Describing simple events: The dynamics of incremental grammatical encoding

Past research on grammatical encoding in speech production mostly involved either determining the proportions of choices between alternative syntactic structures as a function of the conceptual availability of referents, or comparisons of utterance onset latencies for given syntactic structures. We will argue that this approach does not do full justice to the dynamics of the incrementality of production. In five experiments we asked participants to describe animations involving two moving objects. We manipulated the temporal availability of pieces of the conceptual input by withholding for short periods of time either (1) the information about the movement direction of one of the objects, (2) its identity, or (3) both types of information. The results show that both the temporal availability of different types of conceptual information and the latency of utterance onset affect the syntactic structure of descriptions. The results are discussed in the context of theories of incremental syntactic encoding in language production.

Designing research on bilingual development: Behavioral and neurolinguistic experiments

Chapter 1. Introduction by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 2. Multi-factorial studies: Populations and linguistic features by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 3. The multi-lab, multi-language, multi-method challenge By Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.- Chapter 4. Collecting and analyzing spontaneous speech data by Christopher Bergmann.- Chapter 5. Eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm by Sanne Meike Berends, Susanne M. Brouwer and Simone A. Sprenger.- Chapter 6. EEG and event-related brain potentials by Nienke Meulman, Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.

Processing grammatical gender in Dutch: Evidence from eye movements

Previous research has demonstrated that grammatical gender in Dutch is typically acquired late. Most of this work used production data only, and consequently childrens knowledge of Dutch gender may have been underestimated. In this study, therefore, we examined whether 49 4- to 7-year-old Dutch-speaking children (and 19 adult controls) were able to use gender marking in the article preceding the object label during online sentence processing to (a) anticipate the upcoming object label or to (b) facilitate the processing of that label as it is presented. In addition, we investigated whether childrens online processing and production of gender marking on articles were related. In an eye-tracking task, participants were presented with sentences and visual displays with two objects, representing nouns of either the same gender (uninformative) or different genders (informative). Children were divided into a non-targetlike group and a targetlike group on the basis of their scores for neuter nouns in the production task. Our analyses examined whether participants could use gender marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun) and facilitatively (i.e., from noun onset). Results showed that Dutch-speaking adults and children who were successful in production used gender marking anticipatorily. However, children who did not systematically produce gender-marked articles used gender marking only facilitatively. These findings reveal that successful online comprehension may in part be possible before targetlike production is completely in place, but at the same time targetlike production may be a trigger for online comprehension to be completely successful.