Bilingual Language Comprehension Research Articles

Pronoun interpretation in intermediate-advanced L2 English speakers: L2 to L1 cross-linguistic effects

Aims and objectives: L2 learners who speak a null subject (L1 Spanish) and a non-null subject language (L2 English) may experience cross-linguistic interference from the L2 on L1 pronoun interpretation. In this study, we test pronoun interpretation in the L1 and L2 of adult learners, in comparison with two groups of monolingual speakers, to assess if L1 pronoun interpretation can change as a result of L2 acquisition at intermediate-advanced levels of L2 proficiency and in the absence of long L2 immersion. Methodology: A group of L2 English speakers (L1 Spanish) participated in two offline sentence comprehension tasks where they interpreted pronouns in the L1 and L2. The results are compared with English and Spanish monolingual speakers. Data and analysis: We find that adult English learners comprehend pronouns in their L1 (Spanish) differently than Spanish monolingual speakers, demonstrating a strong subject bias for interpreting null and overt pronouns. In addition, we show that pronoun interpretation patterns acquired in the L2 explain the changes to L1 interpretation biases. Conclusions: The results of this study significantly advance the understanding of the factors that contribute to bilingual language comprehension, showing the permeability of the L1 comprehension system at the discourse level as soon as the L2 sets in.

Do accent and input modality modulate processing of language switches in bilingual language comprehension?

We examined how bilinguals process language switches between their first (L1) and second language (L2). Language switching costs (slower responses to language switch than nonswitch trials) appear to arise more systematically in production than in comprehension, possibly because the latter context might sometimes elicit less language coactivation (Declerck et al., 2019). This might reduce language competition and in turn the need for bilinguals to apply language control when processing language switches. Yet even in comprehension, language coactivation may vary depending on variables such as the accent of the speaker (e.g., whether the L2 words are pronounced with an L1 or L2 accent) and input modality (spoken or written). In three experiments conducted during 2021-2022, we tested how unbalanced Mandarin-English bilinguals processed language switches during comprehension and the potential influence of a speaker's accent and input modality. Overall, across settings, participants experienced significant language switching costs. In some conditions, switching costs were larger to L1-Mandarin than to L2-English, an asymmetry consistent with the participants' dominance in L1-Mandarin and the application of language control. However, manipulating accent and input modality did not influence language switches, suggesting they did not impact language coactivation sufficiently to modulate language control. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Supplemental Material for Do Accent and Input Modality Modulate Processing of Language Switches in Bilingual Language Comprehension?

Supplemental Material for Do Accent and Input Modality Modulate Processing of Language Switches in Bilingual Language Comprehension?

The effect of inhibitory control and language proficiency on intra-sentential switching costs in reading comprehension

Based on the inhibition account and activation account, inhibitory control and language proficiency play big roles on language control mechanisms underlying language switching respectively. But it is still debatable whether inhibitory control and language proficiency play roles in sentential context during bilingual language comprehension, and how and when they work if they both do. The present study examined the specific roles of language proficiency and inhibitory control on modulating intra-sentential switching costs in Chinese-English bilinguals using self-paced reading task. Results indicated that language proficiency and switching direction modulated intra-sentential switching costs significantly. Switching costs were larger when switching into L1 than into L2 for the first two code-switched words due to inhibitory effect, but more costly switching into L2 than into L1 since the third code-switched words owing to the effect of relative language proficiency. During bilingual language processing, inhibition and activation of languages shaped a dynamic interplay of complementary language control processes. Specifically, inhibitory control and language proficiency work as a dynamic continuum in language switching at sentence level. Switching into L1 requires the release of inhibition to L1, but switching into L2 asks the activation and access of L2. The interaction effects of language proficiency and inhibitory control influenced the exertion and components of inhibition. This study reconciled the independent roles of language proficiency and inhibitory control on language switching and constructed a new continuum based on language proficiency.

The role of cognitive control in bilingual language comprehension: An event-related potential study of dense code-switching sentences

AbstractThis study investigated the engagement of domain-general cognitive control during the comprehension of dense code-switching sentences. Stimulus-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while L1-dominant Chinese–English bilinguals read switch and non-switch sentences. The results of the reading task revealed language dominance effects on the N400, left anterior negativity (LAN) and late positive component (LPC). The language dominance effects at lexical level (i.e., on the N400 and LAN) were modulated by individual differences in monitoring capacity. In contrast, inhibition capacity predicted code-switching costs at the sentence level (i.e., for the LPC component). The results suggest that proactive monitoring and reactive inhibition affect different processing stages during the comprehension of dense code-switching sentences. These findings partially align with processing models of code-switching incorporating a dual control mode perspective and contribute new insight into the dynamic interplay between reactive and proactive control processes.

Modulating effects of interactional contexts on bilinguals’ cognitive control: Evidence for the Adaptive Control Hypothesis

Aims and Objects: The Adaptive Control Hypothesis (ACH) proposed that different interactional contexts place different demands on cognitive processes for bilinguals. However, how cognitive control processes dynamically adapt to comprehending and producing languages in different interactional contexts is still poorly understood. This study investigated how different language interactional contexts (i.e., single-language, dual-language, and dense code-switching) modulate cognitive control in bilingual language comprehension. Methodology: Inhibitory control in 36 Chinese -English bilinguals was examined through flanker tasks. Participants’ language and cognitive control statuses in the three interactional contexts were manipulated through three different types of dialogue-listening. After they listened to each type of dialogue, they were instructed to complete the flanker task and answer 10 comprehension questions related to the dialogue. Data and analysis: Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) compared participants’ reaction times and response accuracy in flanker tasks across the three interactional contexts. Similarly, their language comprehension performances across different interactional contexts were also compared. Findings/conclusions: Both the dual-language and Chinese single-language contexts showed significant facilitatory effects on participants’ inhibitory control efficiency. Furthermore, participants performed more accurately on answering comprehension questions in the Chinese single-language context, indicating the dominant language effects on modulating bilinguals’ language comprehension performance. Such effects were not found in the dense code-switching and dual-language contexts. Originality: This study provided empirical evidence for the facilitatory effects of dual-language contexts on cognitive control in bilingual language comprehension process, which further extends the ACH to bilingual’s cognitive process associated with language comprehension. Significance/implications: In general, it is an attempt to explore the associations between interactional contexts and cognitive control through bilingual language and cognitive processing manipulations.

Monolingual and bilingual logical representations of quantificational scope: Evidence from priming in language comprehension

• Logical representations can be primed both within a language and across the languages spoken by a bilingual. • Logical representations are shared between the languages spoken by bilinguals in comprehension. • Logical representations constructed in an L2 are comparable to those constructed in an L1. A doubly quantified sentence, such as All hikers climbed a hill , allows two interpretations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line of research by investigating whether bilingual logical representations are shared between languages or separate per language. We conducted four sentence-picture matching experiments in which we primed interpretations of doubly quantified sentences in Dutch and French monolingual and bilingual language comprehension. These experiments showed that bilinguals have fully shared logical representations and that logical representations constructed in the L1 and the L2 are comparable. Moreover, a control experiment ruled out that the priming effects were driven by visual overlap between prime and target pictures. We discuss these findings in terms of a language-dependent account of logical representations, although these findings can also be reconciled with the idea that logical representations involve conceptual mental models of sentence meaning.

How does parallel language activation affect switch costs during trilingual language comprehension?

ABSTRACT Declerck, M., Koch, I., Duñabeitia, J., Grainger, J., & Denise, N. [(2019). What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control? Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception & Performance.] assumed that the absence of switch costs in bilingual language comprehension may be due to little degree of parallel language activation while substantial degree of it may lead to switch costs. This study tested this assumption by examining the switch costs during Russian-English-Chinese trilinguals’ performing lexical decision tasks in language pairs of L1–L2 in Experiment 1a, L1–L3 in Experiment 1b and L2–L3 in Experiment 1c. We found switch costs in L2 in Experiment 1a and switch costs in both L1 and L3 in Experiment 1b, but no switch costs in both L2 and L3 in Experiment 1c. These results generally provided evidence for the account.

Processing Code-Switches in the Presence of Others: An ERP Study.

Code-switching is highly socially constrained. For instance, code-switching is only felicitous when those present are fluent in both languages. This means that bilinguals need to dynamically adjust their language control and expectation of code-switching to the current social situation or context. The aim of the present EEG study was to investigate how and when language control in the comprehension of code-switches is affected by the assumed language knowledge of others in the context. Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences with and without code-switches together with another Spanish-English bilingual or with an English monolingual. Switches elicited an early fronto-central positivity. This effect was smaller overall when a bilingual was present at the start of the study. In addition, the late positive complex found for switches was smaller when a bilingual was present rather than a monolingual, but only for those participants who were sensitive to the other’s language knowledge in their off-line judgments. These findings suggest that the bilinguals in our study expected and activated both languages when initially paired with a bilingual and that they more easily accommodated code-switches, in the presence of a bilingual than in the presence of a monolingual. Our findings support the view that language control can be modulated by the perceived language knowledge of others present, and are compatible with a dynamic control model of bilingual language comprehension.

A different perspective on domain-general language control using the flanker task

Bilingual models diverge in whether they assume that language control is domain general. Most studies that investigated this claim focused on bilingual language production and relied on the comparison between language switching and task switching. In the current study, we set out to investigate whether language control is domain general in a different context (i.e., bilingual language comprehension) and with a different paradigm (i.e., the flanker task). To this end, we let French-English bilinguals perform a bilingual (flankers are words from the same or different language as the target word) and a non-linguistic (numerical magnitude with digits) flanker task. The results showed that there was no difference in the language congruency effect between participants with a high and low non-linguistic congruency effect. These results indicate that there is no substantial overlap in the mechanisms involved in comprehension-based language control and executive control.

What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control.

In the current study, we set out to investigate language control, which is the process that minimizes cross-language interference, during bilingual language comprehension. According to current theories of bilingual language comprehension, language-switch costs, which are a marker for reactive language control, should be observed. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this is not always the case. Furthermore, little to no evidence for language-mixing costs, which are a marker for proactive language control, has been observed in the bilingual language comprehension literature. This is in line with current theories of bilingual language comprehension, as they do not explicitly account for proactive language control. In the current study, we further investigated these two markers of language control and found no evidence for comprehension-based language-switch costs in six experiments, even though other types of switch costs were observed with the exact same setup (i.e., task-switch costs, stimulus modality-switch costs, and production-based language-switch costs). Furthermore, only one out of three experiments showed comprehension-based language-mixing costs, providing the first tentative evidence for proactive language control during bilingual language comprehension. The implications of the absence and occurrence of these costs are discussed in terms of processing speed and parallel language activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

S.14.03 The diminishing role of testosterone on emotional control during adolescence

Research into bilingual language production has identified a language control network that subserves control operations when bilinguals produce speech. Here we explore which brain areas are recruited for control purposes in bilingual language comprehension. In two experimental fMRI sessions, Dutch-English unbalanced bilinguals read words that differed in cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap across their two languages. The need for control operations was further manipulated by varying stimulus list composition across the two experimental sessions. We observed activation of the language control network in bilingual language comprehension as a function of both cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap and stimulus list composition. These findings suggest that the language control network is shared across bilingual language production and comprehension. We argue that activation of the language control network in language comprehension allows bilinguals to quickly and efficiently grasp the context-relevant meaning of words.

Activation of the language control network in bilingual visual word recognition

Research into bilingual language production has identified a language control network that subserves control operations when bilinguals produce speech. Here we explore which brain areas are recruited for control purposes in bilingual language comprehension. In two experimental fMRI sessions, Dutch-English unbalanced bilinguals read words that differed in cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap across their two languages. The need for control operations was further manipulated by varying stimulus list composition across the two experimental sessions. We observed activation of the language control network in bilingual language comprehension as a function of both cross-linguistic form and meaning overlap and stimulus list composition. These findings suggest that the language control network is shared across bilingual language production and comprehension. We argue that activation of the language control network in language comprehension allows bilinguals to quickly and efficiently grasp the context-relevant meaning of words.

Conflict monitoring in bilingual language comprehension? Evidence from a bilingual flanker task

ABSTRACTConflict monitoring, which is a process that detects conflict and initiates control processes to resolve said conflict, is assumed to be implemented in production-based language control. As conflict monitoring is a domain-general process, it should follow that it is also implemented in bilingual language comprehension. However, conflict monitoring is not explicitly implemented in models of bilingual language comprehension. With a bilingual flanker task, we investigated the Congruency Sequence Effect (CSE), which is a marker of conflict monitoring, in a bilingual language comprehension context. The results showed a congruency effect, but no CSE with the bilingual flanker, whereas both a congruency effect and CSE were observed with a non-linguistic numerical flanker. This pattern indicates that conflict monitoring might not arise in bilingual language comprehension.

On the role of language membership information during word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from flanker-language congruency effects.

According to some bilingual language comprehension models (e.g., BIA), language membership information has a direct influence on word processing. However, this idea is not shared by all models (e.g., BIA+). To investigate this matter, we manipulated the language membership of irrelevant flanking words while French-English bilinguals performed a lexical decision task on centrally located target words and nonwords. The target words were either French or English words, flanked by words that were either in the same language as the target (language congruent) or in the other language (language incongruent). We found that lexical decisions to the target words were harder in the language-incongruent condition, indicating that language membership information was extracted from the flanking words and that this affected identification of the central target words, as predicted by the architecture of the BIA model.

Inducing asymmetrical switch costs in bilingual language comprehension by language practice

The most widely discussed observation in the language control literature is the larger cost found when switching into the first than the second language (i.e., asymmetrical switch costs), which has been determined as a marker of persisting, reactive inhibition. While this is a common effect in bilingual language production, it generally does not occur in bilingual language comprehension. In this bilingual language comprehension study, we manipulated the relative activation of languages by letting participants practice in pure language blocks prior to a mixed language block. While no effect was found of practicing second-language words, asymmetrical switch costs were observed when practicing the same (Experiments 1 and 2) or different first-language words (Experiment 3) as in the following mixed language block. These findings indicate that, similar to bilingual production, bilingual comprehension relies on persisting, reactive language control.

Affective language processing and bilingualism: Complementary perspectives

AbstractRecent years have witnessed revival of academic interest in the study of two areas. One is related to processing of emotional input, both linguistic and nonlinguistic; the other is centred on mechanisms underlying bilingual language comprehension and production. The current volume comprises substantial contributions by researchers working within various fields of linguistics and psychology. The Authors elaborate upon cognitively sophisticated frameworks for conceptualising the complexities of attitudes towards and beliefs about language, i.e.

The N400 as a window into lexico-semantic processing in bilingualism

AbstractEvent related potentials (ERPs) have frequently been employed to investigate language comprehension. One of the best researched language-related ERP components is the N400, which is sensitive to various linguistic factors (e.g. plausibility, word frequency, predictability, word-level associations), and is therefore commonly referred to as an index of lexico-semantic memory. Systematic research into electrophysiological indexes of lexico-semantic processing in bilingualism and its comparison with existing monolingual research remains a crucial research avenue. This review synthesizes the literature on the N400 effects observed in bilingual language comprehension studies in the context of selected models of bilingual lexico-semantic processing (i.e. RHM, BIA+), points to potential reasons behind some contradictory results, presents current trends in ERP bilingual research, identifies gaps in this area of research, and, finally, proposes future research directions.

Phonotactic Constraints Are Activated across Languages in Bilinguals.

During spoken language comprehension, auditory input activates a bilingual’s two languages in parallel based on phonological representations that are shared across languages. However, it is unclear whether bilinguals access phonotactic constraints from the non-target language during target language processing. For example, in Spanish, words with s+ consonant onsets cannot exist, and phonotactic constraints call for epenthesis (addition of a vowel, e.g., stable/estable). Native Spanish speakers may produce English words such as estudy (“study”) with epenthesis, suggesting that these bilinguals apply Spanish phonotactic constraints when speaking English. The present study is the first to examine whether bilinguals access Spanish phonotactic constraints during English comprehension. In an English cross-modal priming lexical decision task, Spanish–English bilinguals and English monolinguals heard English cognate and non-cognate primes containing s+ consonant onsets or controls without s+ onsets, followed by a lexical decision on visual targets with the /e/ phonotactic constraint or controls without /e/. Results revealed that bilinguals were faster to respond to /es/ non-word targets preceded by s+ cognate primes and /es/ and /e/ non-word targets preceded by s+ non-cognate primes, confirming that English primes containing s+ onsets activated Spanish phonotactic constraints. These findings are discussed within current accounts of parallel activation of two languages during bilingual spoken language comprehension, which may be expanded to include activation of phonotactic constraints from the irrelevant language.

Interference and Inhibition in Bilingual Language Comprehension: Evidence from Polish-English Interlingual Homographs.

The main goal of the present study was to explore the involvement of inhibition in resolution of cross-language activation in bilingual comprehension and a possible modulatory effect of L2 proficiency. We used a semantic relatedness judgment task in L2 English that included Polish-English interlingual homographs and English translations of the Polish homographs’ meanings. Based on previous studies using the same paradigm, we expected a strong homograph interference and inhibition of the homographs’ Polish meanings translations. In addition, we predicted that participants with lower L2 proficiency would experience greater interference and stronger inhibitory effects. The reported results confirm a strong homograph interference effect. In addition, our results indicate that the scope of inhibition generalized from the homograph’s irrelevant meaning to a whole semantic category, indicating the flexibility of the inhibitory mechanisms. Contrary to our expectations, L2 proficiency did not modulate the effects of interference and inhibition, possibly due to a relatively low variability in proficiency within our participant sample.