Bilingual Cognition Research Articles

The effects of aging on bilingual language: What changes, what doesn't, and why

AbstractSubstantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals’ language performance, though there is considerable variability in the trajectory across adulthood (declines, age-invariance, and improvements) and in the extent to which these trajectories resemble those found in monolinguals. I argue that these age effects are likely explained by the key opposing forces of increasing experience and cognitive declines in aging. Second, consistent with some theoretical work on bilingual language processing, the grammatical processing mechanisms do not seem to change between younger and older bilingual adults, even after decades of immersion. I conclude by discussing how future research can further advance the field.

An empirical study of the classifier effect in advanced L2 users of Chinese

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:This article examines the classifier effect on categorization among advanced Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners. More specifically, it aims to answer this question: Is non-classifier language speakers’ categorization of objects influenced by the acquisition of the Chinese classifier system?Design/methodology/approach, data and analysis:Native Chinese speakers, advanced CSL learners and non-CSL participants were asked to rate the relatedness of drawing pairs based on either classifier or taxonomy/theme; advanced CSL learners and non-CSL participants were then asked to immediately recall two lists of nouns, one associated with three taxonomic categories and the other with three classifiers. Repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted to examine the major effect between drawing relations (classifier related, taxonomically/thematically related and unrelated) and participant groups. Two measures of NCR (number of correct recall) and RR (ratio of repetition) were calculated and analysed to examine effective memory retrieval as well as subjective clustering.Findings/conclusions:Results showed that preferences for classifier-based and taxonomy/theme -based categorizations differed between advanced CSL learners and non-CSL participants. CSL learners’ knowledge of the classifier system also facilitated their performance in recalling and clustering objects. The findings revealed that concepts in bilingual minds may be language-specific and an alternative interpretation of the real world is internalized by learning a new language.Originality:Unlike previous studies, this article extended the examination of the cognitive consequences of classifiers to late bilinguals whose second language (L2) proficiency was formally assessed.Significance/implications:This study contributes empirical data supporting the importance of nonverbal behavioural evidence in the study of bilingual cognition. The degree and nature of the restructuring of real-world referents as a consequence of acquiring Chinese classifiers is of pedagogical value to second-language acquisition (SLA).

Attentional Control in Bilingualism: An Exploration of the Effects of Trait Anxiety and Rumination on Inhibition.

Bilingual individuals have been reported to show enhanced executive function in comparison to monolingual peers. However, the role of adverse emotional traits such as trait anxiety and rumination in bilingual cognitive control has not been established. Attentional Control Theory holds that anxiety disproportionately impacts processing efficiency (typically measured via reaction time) in comparison to accuracy (performance effectiveness). We administered eye tracking and behavioural measures of inhibition to young, healthy monolingual and highly proficient bilingual adults. We found that trait anxiety was a reliable risk factor for decreased inhibitory control accuracy in bilingual but not monolingual participants. These findings, therefore, indicate that adverse emotional traits may differentially modulate performance in monolingual and bilingual individuals, an interpretation which has implications both for ACT and future research on bilingual cognition.

Monolingual but not bilingual infants demonstrate racial bias in social cue use

Bilingualism exerts early and pervasive effects on cognition, observable in infancy. Thus far, investigations of infant bilingual cognition have focused on sensitivity to visual memory, executive function, and linguistic sensitivity. Much less research has focused on how bilingualism impacts processing of social cues. The present study sought to investigate whether bilingualism modulates the expression of one aspect of social processing: early racial bias. Using a gaze-following paradigm, we investigated whether 18- to 20-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants favored their own race. Results demonstrated that monolingual infants favored their own race in following a model whose direction of gaze signaled an event. In contrast, bilingual infants demonstrated race-neutral gaze-following patterns, relying more heavily on the reliability of the behavior of the model over race. Findings suggest that bilingualism may have protective effects against the early emergence of racial bias.

Shared core meanings and shared associations in bilingual semantic memory: Evidence from research on implicit memory

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions:The degree of overlap across languages in bilingual semantic memory has been debated in the cognitive bilingual literature for decades. This paper focuses on theory and recent evidence addressing the questions of whether translation-equivalent words in a bilingual person’s two languages access common core-meaning representations and whether long-standing semantic/conceptual associations among words are language-general or language-specific.Design/methodology/approach:We explain a theoretical approach to this problem and review recent evidence that addresses it. The empirical work cited used primarily memory tasks in which the languages of the word stimuli or responses changed from encoding to test.Data and analysis:Several studies are reviewed. In most cases, data were analyzed using an analysis of variance.Findings/conclusions:Robust between-language priming was observed for concrete nouns, abstract nouns, verbs, and adjectives using a variety of specific tasks, indicating that the semantic representations of translation equivalents overlap. The reduction in priming relative to within-language conditions could be explained in some cases by repetition of language-specific processes in the within-language conditions. Results of repetition-priming and false-memory experiments that involved semantic associations showed that category–exemplar, noun–verb, antonym, and other semantic relationships are shared across languages in a common semantic system.Originality:Many of the results are interpreted with respect to questions that have not been addressed in previous work.Significance/implications:The nature of semantic system integration is important for understanding bilingual cognition. Episodic memory tasks can be a useful way to study the organization of core-meaning representations in bilinguals, and indicate that these representations are shared across languages. However, these procedures do not capture other aspects of semantic representation that may differ across languages.

Book review: David Miller, Fatih Bayram, Jason Rothman and Ludovica Serratrice (Eds.), Bilingual cognition and language: The state of the science across its subfield

Book review: David Miller, Fatih Bayram, Jason Rothman and Ludovica Serratrice (Eds.), <i>Bilingual cognition and language: The state of the science across its subfield</i>

The linguistic transparency of first language calendar terms affects calendar calculations in a second language

Calendar calculations – e.g., calculating the nth month after a certain month – are an important component of temporal cognition, and can vary cross-linguistically. English speakers rely on a verbal list representation-processing system. Chinese speakers – whose calendar terms are numerically transparent – rely on a more efficient numerical system. Does knowing a numerically transparent calendar lexicon facilitate calendar calculations in an opaque second language? Late Chinese-English bilinguals and English native speakers performed a Month and a Weekday Calculation Task in English. Directionality (forward/backward) and boundary-crossing (within/across the year/week boundary) were manipulated. English speakers relied on verbal list processing, and were slower in backward than forward calculations. In spite of the English calendar system's opaqueness, bilinguals relied on numerical processing, were slower in across- than within-boundary trials, and under some conditions had faster RTs than the native speakers. Results have implications for research on temporal cognition, linguistic relativity and bilingual cognition.

Listener-adapted speech

Abstract While a significant amount of research has focussed on whether bilingualism bestows advantages in cognitive skills, perspective-taking and Theory of Mind, less is known about the effect of bilingualism in communicative tasks where these and related skills may be called for. This study examines bilingual and monolingual adults’ communicative skills through their production of two types of listener-adapted speech (LAS): child-directed speech and foreigner-directed speech. 20 monolinguals and 20 bilingual adults were asked to explain a cooking recipe to a child, a non-native adult and a control native adult. Participants adapted their speech for the child and the foreigner compared to the native adult. Furthermore, bilinguals adapted some features of their speech to a greater extent and in a fine-tuned way (wider pitch range addressing the child and vowel hyperarticulation addressing the foreigner). The prevalence of these features in bilingual speech was not correlated with personality or cognitive measures. We discuss possible sources of this difference in speech adaptation and implications for theories of bilingual cognition.

Integrated, Not Isolated: Defining Typological Proximity in an Integrated Multilingual Architecture.

On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions of typological proximity. The obvious intuition is that the more closely related two languages are, the easier it should be to implement the two languages in one mind. This is the starting point adopted here, but we immediately run into the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of cognitive, computational, and linguistic research on bi- and multilingualism exhibits a monolingual bias (i.e., where monolingual grammars are used as the standard of comparison for outputs from bilingual grammars). The primary questions so far have focused on how bilinguals balance and switch between their two languages, but our perspective on typology leads us to consider the nature of bi- and multi-lingual systems as a whole. Following an initial proposal from Hsin (2014), we conjecture that bilingual grammars are neither isolated, nor (completely) conjoined with one another in the bilingual mind, but rather exist as integrated source grammars that are further mitigated by a common, combined grammar (Cook, 2016; Goldrick et al., 2016a,b; Putnam and Klosinski, 2017). Here we conceive such a combined grammar in a parallel, distributed, and gradient architecture implemented in a shared vector-space model that employs compression through routinization and dimensionality reduction. We discuss the emergence of such representations and their function in the minds of bilinguals. This architecture aims to be consistent with empirical results on bilingual cognition and memory representations in computational cognitive architectures.

Above, on, or shang ()? Language and spatial representations among English-Mandarin bilinguals.

This study investigated if exposure to spatial language could affect spatial cognition in English-Mandarin bilinguals by focusing on contact/noncontact distinctions, an area that has been a source of contention in the language-and-thought literature. Sixty-three participants were first primed with sentences containing spatial terms (e.g., above, on) before performing a spatial decision task. Approximately half of the participants (n = 33) were primed in English; for the remaining participants (n = 30), primes comprising Mandarin spatial terms-which mark spatial distinctions differently than in English (e.g., shang in Mandarin signifies both above and on in English)-were employed instead. Our findings revealed that participants' performance was influenced by spatial primes in the English experiment, thereby proffering evidence for thinking-for-speaking effects. However, these findings were not mirrored for the Mandarin experiment, confirming that the contact/noncontact specificity of spatial terms may have been instrumental in engendering the thinking-for-speaking effects observed in English.

Cultural Differences in Event Construal: Evidence from Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

According to cross-cultural psychology research, East Asians and Westerners perceive and evaluate the world in different ways. While East Asians are inclined to follow a broad perceptual or conceptual field and to be concerned with relationships between objects, Westerners are more likely to concentrate on a focal object and its properties. Ample evidence is now available that shows that these cross-cultural differences may yield differences in cognitive processes (Nisbett, 2010; Nisbett & Miyamoto, 2005). However, research into cultural influences on cognition to date has largely focused on examining monolingual speakers, and less is known about how cross-cultural influences affect bilingual cognition. Therefore, in the present study, an attempt was made to examine how Korean-English bilinguals, sampled at varying levels (n = 80), interpreted event scenes in comparison to Korean and English monolinguals (n = 15 each). Participants were asked to describe four event scenes, which could afford multiple perceptual interpretations. The event descriptions by the Korean and English monolinguals revealed typical East Asian and Western cognitive styles, respectively, to interpret and describe event scenes. Furthermore, the pattern of the event construal of the bilinguals did not completely match that of either monolingual group, suggesting that they have been influenced by both East Asian and Western modes of thought when interpreting and describing event scenes.

Language monitoring in bilinguals as a mechanism for rapid lexical divergence

Recent studies have highlighted divergent change as a more common outcome of language contact than previously thought. While convergent change is often attributed to bilingual cognitive pressures, divergent change has usually been explained by appealing to sociocultural factors. We argue that the effects of social pressures on linguistic systems must nevertheless be realized in how language is processed in the individual bilingual speaker and, therefore, that divergent change is also ultimately rooted in bilingual cognition. Since lexical forms are most susceptible to contact-induced divergent change we focus on their production. We begin by developing a cognitive model that combines Grosjean’s language mode with a later output-monitoring stage. The parameters to the model are then fit to the results of an experiment in which bilinguals are seen to avoid shared lexical items. These best-fit parameters form the basis of a series of multi-agent simulations that show rapid divergence in the lexica of languages with large proportions of bilinguals. We consider the implications of these findings for the psycholinguistic study of bilingual lexical selection, the construction of phylogenies, and the reconstruction of language family histories.

Why are bilinguals better than monolinguals at false-belief tasks?

In standard Theory of Mind tasks, such as the Sally-Anne, children have to predict the behaviour of a mistaken character, which requires attributing the character a false belief. Hundreds of developmental studies in the last 30 years have shown that children under 4 fail standard false-belief tasks. However, recent studies have revealed that bilingual children and adults outperform their monolingual peers in this type of tasks. Bilinguals' better performance in false-belief tasks has generally been interpreted as a result of their better inhibitory control; that is, bilinguals are allegedly better than monolinguals at inhibiting the erroneous response to the false-belief question. In this review, I challenge the received view and argue instead that bilinguals' better false-belief performance results from more effective attention management. This challenge ties in with two independent lines of research: on the one hand, recent studies on the role of attentional processes in false-belief tasks with monolingual children and adults; and on the other, current research on bilinguals' performance in different Executive Function tasks. The review closes with an exploratory discussion of further benefits of bilingual cognition to Theory of Mind development and pragmatics, which may be independent from Executive Function.

Variation in Spanish heritage speakers’ bilingualism and cognition

Abstract The variation that characterizes bilinguals and bilingualism is perhaps even more prominent when it comes to bilinguals who are heritage speakers of one of their languages. This variation is highly influential over the course of a lifetime in shaping and reshaping bilingual cognition, which we understand to be at once socially and individually embedded and guided. We first summarize some of the qualities that distinguish bilingual cognition from monolingual cognition. We then consider heritage speakers as a particular profile of bilingual, and discuss how variation that is specific to heritage speakers’ bilingual experience influences cognition across the lifespan.

Discussing the Language and Thought of Motion in Second Language Speakers

These concluding reflections seek to put the articles of this special issue in a broader context. The article begins by looking at the ideas of cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity that are invoked. It then considers the questions that arise about the relationship between two or more languages in the same mind, the differences between the thinking of monolinguals and bilinguals, and whether cognitive changes in bilingualism are language‐specific or universal and how they might contribute to language teaching. The aim is both to help the reader appreciate the nature of these contributions and to raise some, probably unanswerable, questions about this research domain. The intention is to bring out some of what this particular approach to second language (L2) research is, and is not, saying. The approach to second language acquisition (SLA) to which the contributions belong treats the second language (L2) user as a many‐sided whole, in whom the languages interact with other mental systems, rather than as only the possessor of a grammar, concentrating on the complex relationship between language and cognition. The articles form part of a thriving SLA research movement, described in books such as Pavlenko (2011, 2014), De Groot (2011), and Cook &amp; Bassetti (2011) that has started to explore how L2 users think—bilingual cognition—primarily through psycholinguistic experiments and techniques. They draw on the wing of cognitive linguistics that Evans (2011) calls “cognitive approaches to grammar” rather than on the “cognitive lexical semantics” wing, by focussing on how motion is expressed in speech, particularly on two key approaches to the relationship of motion and language, namely those by Talmy (1985) and Slobin (1996), who are referred to in all but two of the articles. The contributions to this special issue ask questions about L2 acquisition that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago and that allow SLA research for the first time to approach major issues about language in the human mind.

Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages Aneta Pavlenko (ed.) (2011) Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pp. 267 ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-337-2 (hbk)

Book review.

Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko (2008) New York and London: Routledge. Pp 287. ISBN 0805838856

Crosslinguistic influence in language and cognition. Scott Jarvis and Aneta Pavlenko (2008) New York and London: Routledge. Pp 287. ISBN 0805838856Reviewed by Anastassia ZabrodskajaToday monolingualism is often perceived as an unmarked phenomenon that does not require any explanations (see the famous example by Romaine [1995] 2000:1 that a book entitled Monolingualism would appear extremely strange). Continuing the analogy, one can say that approaches to language that ignore language contacts are also viewed as natural and do not require any theoreti- cal or methodological explanations (hence 'contactlessness' of a language is unmarked and contacts are not). Indeed, most linguistic theory presents languages as homogenous and clear-cut entities. However, there is no language that is not affected by contacts, be it to a smaller or greater extent.The expression 'language contact' is somewhat imprecise because it is speakers of different varieties who communicate and not merely language systems. In this respect, Weinreich ([1953] 1966:71) was right in his claim that the bilingual brain is the locus of language contact. By saying this he stressed the cognitive dimension of bilingualism and language contact. Still, despite this early remark, the monolingual native speaker is a default yardstick in many theories and contact-induced language change is considered to be less relevant. From the contact linguistics point of view, however, the sameness of linguistic systems in all speakers in a given speech community is an illusion. As soon as we deal with a multilingual speaker, it is not clear what is the mother tongue (see Skutnabb Kangas, 1988:18, 91; 2000:106, 573). Bilingual speakers' cognition and linguistic intuition (i.e., judgement on what is acceptable/unacceptable) are different from those of a monolingual speaker.The question of the relevance of contact-induced language change is not new. In the second half of the nineteenth century in the so-called Schuchardt-Muller controversy Hugo Schuchardt was ahead of his time, claiming 'Es gibt keine vollig ungemischte Sprache', 'There is no completely unmixed language' (1884, quoted from Thomason and Kaufman, [1988] 1991:1). Some scholars discarded this idea altogether, while some believed that no language has been influenced by another language to such an extent that this would make genetic classification difficult (or even impossible). Yet some went further and claimed that all languages are creoles. While this claim is not true in its absolute form, certain languages exist that cannot be traced back to a single proto-language because their grammatical systems and their lexicons originate from genetically different sources.To a great extent, Schuchardt was right. Contact-induced language change is as important as internal change. What is more, in some situations it is difficult to distinguish between the two (multiple causation). According to Croft (2000:8), there is no fundamental difference between internally and externally caused changes. We have no reasons to believe that this was different in the past.Another debate concerns the relevance of structural and typological factors on the one hand and of sociolinguistic factors on the other. Based on empirical data, various predictions about borrowability have been made and constraints on contact-induced language change formulated. However, in the light of abundant counterevidence the universality of constraints should be doubted (Clyne, 1987).A look at the history of studies on contact-induced language change so far makes clear that to date researchers use notions such as 'interference' (Weinreich, [1953] 1966), 'code-copying' (Johanson, 2002), 'cross-linguistic influence' (Jarvis, 2002), 'transfer' (Heine and Kuteva, 2005) and 'convergence' (Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill, 2005), but still talk about more or less the same topic - how morphosyntactic similarities between the two language systems increase. …

Bilingualism and enhanced attention in early adulthood

This exploratory study investigated executive attention during nonverbal and verbal processing among adults with a range of bilingual experience. Previous research has found that bilingual children control their attention better than their monolingual peers and that superior attentional control in some processing contexts persists into adulthood among lifelong bilinguals. An open question is whether late-acquired experience learning and using two languages can lead to enhanced executive attention or whether these cognitive advantages are available only to individuals whose bilingualism develops in early childhood. A total of 48 Spanish–English bilinguals completed verbal and nonverbal tasks designed to assess aspects of executive attention including inhibitory control and monitoring and switching of attention (i.e. working memory capacity). Preliminary results suggest an association between bilingual experience and enhanced efficiency of these components of executive attention in the nonverbal domain. Furthermore, a significant relationship between the efficiency of inhibitory control in verbal and nonverbal domains hints at a connection between specific control over language and enhanced domain-general executive control that may be more or less evident depending on task demands. These encouraging pilot results warrant larger-scale replication that brings together data from both linguistic and nonlinguistic processing as bilingualism research seeks to extend its understanding of bilingual cognition.

Conceptual transfer: Crosslinguistic effects in categorization and construal

Research on the relationship between language and cognition in bilinguals has often focused on general effects that are common to bilinguals of all language backgrounds, such as the positive effects of bilingualism in various areas of cognitive development (e.g., Bialystok, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). However, there are also language-specific effects in the relationship between language and cognition in bilinguals that emerge in the form of cross-linguistic influence and, in many cases, these cross-linguistic effects do not appear to be confined to purely linguistic (e.g., phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic) phenomena. For example, bilinguals’ choice of words for referring to objects and actions, as well as their choice of syntactic and discursive structures for referring to events and situations, often reflect ways of conveying meaning and intentions that are specific to particular language backgrounds.

Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues

Previous studies demonstrate that lexical coding of colour influences categorical perception of colour, such that participants are more likely to rate two colours to be more similar if they belong to the same linguistic category (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005). Recent work shows changes in Greek–English bilinguals' perception of within and cross-category stimulus pairs as a function of the availability of the relevant colour terms in semantic memory, and the amount of time spent in the L2-speaking country (Athanasopoulos, 2009). The present paper extends Athanasopoulos' (2009) investigation by looking at cognitive processing of colour in Japanese–English bilinguals. Like Greek, Japanese contrasts with English in that it has an additional monolexemic term for ‘light blue’(mizuiro). The aim of the paper is to examine to what degree linguistic and extralinguistic variables modulate Japanese–English bilinguals' sensitivity to the blue/light blue distinction. Results showed that those bilinguals who used English more frequently distinguished blue and light blue stimulus pairs less well than those who used Japanese more frequently. These results suggest that bilingual cognition may be dynamic and flexible, as the degree to which it resembles that of either monolingual norm is, in this case, fundamentally a matter of frequency of language use.