Bilingual Speakers Research Articles

The Acquisition of the Spanish Trill (/R/) by Child Heritage Speakers: An Overview and Research Proposal

I propose an analysis on the acquisition of the alveolar trill /r/ by Spanish-speaking children as a heritage language. I aim to determine to what extent the acquisition of the trill by these speakers may differ from the same process in monolingual children. To that end, I will recruit twenty children Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers (3-6 years of age), and twenty monolingual children of the same age who have never been exposed to another language. To collect the data, I will schedule brief Zoom meetings with the parents of the participants, and I will ask them to connect with the children to play a quick game (a picture-naming task). I will carefully listen to the recordings and examine the participant’s accuracy to produce the acoustic features of the Spanish trill. I will analyze all the tokens acoustically using PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2017). The research hopes to be a contribution in the field of phonological acquisition of Spanish in bilingual settings, and to fill a gap in the literature regarding the development of the trill by heritage speakers.

Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence in motion event conceptualisation in bilingual speakers of Spanish and English

Abstract We investigated bidirectional cross-linguistic influence on motion event (ME) expressions in bilingual speakers of two typological different languages (Talmy’s typology), Spanish (as L1) and English (as L2). Specifically, we investigated whether bilingual speakers struggle to learn ME expressions in the L2, and whether this process affects ME uses in the L1. Potential effects of L2 proficiency and L2 AoA in both L1 and L2 was also studied. ME expressions elicited from 6-second video-clips were analysed for manner and path components at the level of the verb and of the clause. Results support the hypothesis of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence on motion event conceptualization. In bilinguals’ L2, we observed patterns of restructuring, convergence and L1 transfer. In bilinguals’ L1, we reported structural and conceptualization patterns that seem to emerge from the contact with the L2. Proficiency and AoA showed modulation in the use of manner verbs on both L2 and L1.

Psycholinguistics: Cognitive Processes and Language Cross Interaction in Bilingualism in Educational Institutions

This article provides a brief review of psycholinguistic research that has been conducted to reveal the processes and representations of bilingualism that occur in a multicultural society, especially. The main conclusion from the description of the different levels of representation that has been presented both at the lexical level, semantic level, and syntactic level is that bilingual speakers always experience different languages as long as their use continues. Both bilingual speakers and speech partners benefit from the universal characteristics of the languages they master in an integrated manner. In line with this conclusion, recommendations that can be given regarding psycholinguistic research are on the study of language control and language transfer.

Noun canonicity in heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish

The present investigation examines the role of Spanish noun gender-correlated endings when accessing gender agreement in two different linguistic populations: Spanish-English bilingual heritage speakers and monolingual speakers of Spanish. This study analyzed data from 34 monolingual speakers of Spanish from the Dominican Republic and 44 heritage speakers of Spanish born in the United States who completed a picture naming task in Experiment 1 (determiner-noun agreement) and a picture description task in Experiment 2 (noun-adjective agreement). Results found that canonicity, particularly overt gender marking cues, seemed to have a facilitatory effect for monolingual speakers as seen by significantly faster naming times with transparent nouns on both experiments RTs analysis. However, within the heritage speaker group, no canonicity effects were found on either experiments RTs analyses indicating a difference between the monolingual and bilingual group. There was, however, an effect of noun canonicity in the accuracy rates of both experiments in the monolingual and bilingual group, specifically, a facilitatory effect of transparency, consonant with other studies with heritage speakers and/or monolingual speakers of Spanish (Hur, Lopez and Sanchez 2020; Montrul, Davidson, De La Fuente and Foote 2014; Montrul, De La Fuente, Davidson and Foote 2013; Alarcón 2011; Montrul, Foote and Perpiñán 2008). The main effects of canonicity and frequency found in Experiment 1 monolingual’s RTs analysis and the interaction between frequency and canonicity found in Experiment 2 strongly suggest that canonicity along with noun frequency (noun lexico-syntactic information) have a facilitatory effect in the gender agreement process. Therefore, these results corroborate the predictions of the Two-Route Hypothesis proposed by Gollan and Frost (2001) and psycholinguistic studies that have found a lexico-syntactic route and word-form route to gender access (Caffarra, Jansen and Barber 2014). Findings in the present study contribute to the understanding of different processing mechanisms in two adult populations and to our knowledge of the overall role of predictive nominal endings in gender agreement processes in both monolingual and heritage speakers of Spanish.

The Language of Subtitles for Arabic-English Bilingual Speakers in the United Arab Emirates

This paper investigates the use of subtitles by Arabic-English bilingual speakers in the UAE. While extant research on the effects of subtitles on language acquisition focuses on either first language acquisition by children or second or foreign acquisition by monolingual speakers, this study examines bilingual speakers and their preference for the language of subtitles in different contexts via an online questionnaire. Results from 28 Arabic-English bilingual speakers revealed that subtitles were used more frequently for foreign language films and English language films over Arabic language films, and English was the preferred subtitle language regardless of the language of the film. Higher dependence on subtitles for English language films in contrast to lower dependence on subtitles for Arabic language films suggests the participants’ lower English proficiency and higher proficiency in Arabic. However, an analysis of self-reported language proficiency revealed that participants were more dominant in English, which also accounts for the selection of English as a preferred subtitle language. The paper concludes that such contradictory findings reflect linguistic dualism between English and Arabic that prevails in the UAE, which is due to the proliferation of English especially in the education sector in the country.

Translation and cross-cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese of two brief screening tools for at-risk psychosis youth: the Prodromal Questionnaire (PQ-16) and the PRIME-Screen.

Prodromal characteristics of psychosis have been described for more than a century. Over the last three decades, a variety of studies have proposed methods to prospectively identify individuals (and youth in particular) who are at high risk of developing a psychotic disorder. These studies have validated various screening instruments and made them available in several languages. Here, we describe the translation into Brazilian Portuguese and cross-cultural adaptation of two such screening tools - the Prodromal Questionnaire-16 (PQ-16) and the Prevention through Risk Identification, Management, and Education (PRIME)-Screen. Two bilingual native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese translated the questionnaires from English. A native English speaker then performed back-translations into English. These back-translated versions were submitted to the original authors. They provided feedback and later approved the final versions. After translation and cross-cultural adaptation, no items needed to be changed in the adapted PQ-16 and four items were revised in the PRIME-Screen. After the peer-review process, we included two suggestions in the PQ-16 to facilitate use of the tool in our cultural and social contexts. The PRIME-Screen did not need further changes. These new instruments can help screen Brazilian Portuguese-speaking patients who are at risk of psychosis in primary care.

Funeral and Memorial Tradition in Neighbour Slavic and Aroumanian Villages of Macedonia

The Romanian population of the Balkans is distributed unevenly throughout the peninsula. In particular, in Macedonia, the Aromanians mainly live dispersedly within the Slavic settlements, however some city areas and even separate settlements might be considered Aromanian enclaves. In June 2022, a ten-day ethnolinguistic expedition took place in the city of Kruševo and in the villages nearby Bitola (North Macedonia). The purpose of this field survey was to study the Aromanians living close to the Macedonian population in this area. Despite the preservation of the historical memory and their own distinct identity from those around them, the native speakers of the Aromanian very infrequently use their own idiom. In everyday communication and even in the family, the Aromanians give preference to the commonly used Macedonian language. Constant intensive contacts of the Slavic and non-Slavic populations contributed to the linguistic and cultural interference in the traditions under discussion. This article aims to acquaint the reader with the folk tradition on the example of the commemorative practices common in the Balkan region under consideration. The funeral and memorial rite was chosen as the main topic, since it is in its structure that one can find the most archaic elements of traditional folk culture, reflecting ancient mythological ideas. There are also contemporary dialect texts in the Macedonian language, recorded from often bilingual native speakers. Detailed ethnolinguistic descriptions of the funeral and memorial rites give an idea of the archaic elements of the traditional folk culture, borrowed and developed in contacts. The fragments of the Eastern Romanian tradition are reflected in the rituals borrowed and adopted by the Slavs, and vice versa ― the terminological vocabulary was borrowed into Aromanian idiom.

Robust Speaker Verification Using Deep Weight Space Ensemble

Domain shift is one of the most challenging problems in speaker verification. Although numerous methods have been proposed to address domain shift, most approaches optimize the performance of one domain at the sacrifice of the other. As a result, to obtain the best performance, each domain requires a dedicated model. However, deploying multiple models is resource-demanding and impractical, particularly when the deployment domains are not known in advance. Recent studies in deep neural networks (DNNs) suggest that near the low error surface of the DNN's weight space, there exists a linear path connecting a base model and a fine-tuned model. This finding inspires us to combine the strength of the fine-tuned models and the base models to solve challenging SV problems. Specifically, we aim to develop models that can handle 1) mixed text-dependent (TD) and text-independent (TI) speaker verification where the speech content can be either unconstrained or constrained, 2) cross-channel speaker verification where the recording can be 16 kHz high-fidelity microphone speech or 8 kHz telephone speech, and 3) bi-lingual speaker verification where the enrollment and test speech can be one of the two languages. With weight space ensemble, we show that we can substantially improve the tasks mentioned above, with a 39.6% improvement in mixing TD and TI SV, a 17.4% improvement in bi-lingual SV, and an 18.4% improvement in cross-channel SV. Moreover, we show that the weight space ensemble can also enhance the performance in the target domain, thanks to the regularization effect of the interpolation.

Digital Language Use in Bangka as Contribution to Digital Culture and Heritage

This research aims to find out how the bilingual speakers of Khek and Malay in Bangka communicate using the messaging app, find out regarding what shifts that could be identified in the use of the languages, and find out what the attitudes of the Bangkanese people are towards Khek and Malay. The method is approaching a descriptive qualitative design which involves some screenshots of WhatsApp chat to analyze as well as a questionnaire for the participants to answer. The results show that they indeed use the certain codes while performing a digital communication such as language shift, code switching, code mixing, and unique words. Moreover, they have a positive attitudes toward both Khek and Malay for some reasons. The most important part is that through the digital communication have they spread the cultures from both Chinese-Indonesian and Malays by using Khek and Malay as well as the fact that the languages used during the process of digital communication have exposed their heritage and identity. This research needs to be further investigated about the language preservation due to the fact that some people cannot speak one of those particular languages actively. With further investigation will reveal the current condition of those languages.

The Involvement of Listening Effort in Explaining Bilingual Listening Under Adverse Listening Conditions.

The current review examines listening effort to uncover how it is implicated in bilingual performance under adverse listening conditions. Various measures of listening effort, including physiological, behavioral, and subjective measures, have been employed to examine listening effort in bilingual children and adults. Adverse listening conditions, stemming from environmental factors, as well as factors related to the speaker or listener, have been examined. The existing literature, although relatively limited to date, points to increased listening effort among bilinguals in their nondominant second language (L2) compared to their dominant first language (L1) and relative to monolinguals. Interestingly, increased effort is often observed even when speech intelligibility remains unaffected. These findings emphasize the importance of considering listening effort alongside speech intelligibility. Building upon the insights gained from the current review, we propose that various factors may modulate the observed effects. These include the particular measure selected to examine listening effort, the characteristics of the adverse condition, as well as factors related to the particular linguistic background of the bilingual speaker. Critically, further research is needed to better understand the impact of these factors on listening effort. The review outlines avenues for future research that would promote a comprehensive understanding of listening effort in bilingual individuals.

How processing emotion affects language control in bilinguals.

Research has shown that several variables affect language control among bilingual speakers but the effect of affective processing remains unexplored. Chinese-English bilinguals participated in a novel prime-target language switching experiment in which they first judged the affective valence (i.e., positive or negative) of auditorily presented words and then named pictures with neutral emotional valence in either the same (non-switch trial) or different language (switch trial). Brain activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The behavioral performance showed that the typical switch cost (i.e., the calculated difference between switch and non-switch trials) emerged after processing positive words but not after negative words. Brain imaging demonstrated that processing negative words immediately before non-switch picturing naming trials (but not for switch trials) increased activation in brain areas associated with domain-general cognitive control. The opposite patterns were found after processing positive words. These findings suggest that an (emotional) negative priming effect is induced by spontaneous exposure to negative words and that these priming effects may be triggered by reactive emotional processing and that they may interact with higher level cognitive functions.

The three-dot sign in language contact

Abstract In this study, we investigate the three-dot sign as a discourse marker (DM) with textual, subjective and intersubjective discourse functions. As a graphical marker that is used across languages, the three-dot sign is especially suitable for comparative studies and dynamics in language contact. Our corpus study targeting instant messages of different languages (English, German, Greek, Russian, Turkish) and speaker groups (monolinguals and bilingual heritage speakers) suggests that graphical DMs are prone to cross-linguistic influence. This depends on the specific contact situation and does not seem to be a general effect of bilingualism. The societal status of a language might further influence the use of such markers in digital informal writing. Language-specific developments that relate to emerging functions indicate that functional versatility promotes frequent use of (graphical) DMs.

THE FUNCTIONS OF CODE-SWITCHING USED DURING THE STUDENT-TEACHER INTERACTIONS IN THE CLASSROOMS: OBSERVATIONS AND IMPACTS

The alternation among a number of languages within a stretch of language, recognized as "code-switching" (CS), is considered a valuable strategy for bilinguals in trying to make linguistic choices for purposes of communication. According to different points of view, code-switching can be viewed as a strategy to communicate meanings at the macro scale (such as identity, solidarity, etc.) or as an attempt to convey intended meaning to the hearer within the limits of conversational interaction at the micro-scale. Even though code-switching is widely accepted as a strategy for bilingual speakers, its application in foreign language learning remains controversial. However, recent researchers have emphasized its potential. This small-scale research looks at code-switching by students and teachers in an English as a foreign language lesson at Jordan University. Dialogue analysis was employed to analyze sample extracts and transcripts' code-switching occurrences. The results indicate that code-switching is being used by students and teachers to obtain access to language or as a classroom management method. This study also shows that code-switching can be utilized by learners to avoid L2 when the lesson content is irrelevant to them. In such cases, code-switching does not achieve its potential as a discourse strategy, and learning languages is unlikely to be facilitated.

Characterizing Speech Sound Productions in Bilingual Speakers of Jamaican Creole and English: Application of Durational Acoustic Methods.

This study examined the speech acoustic characteristics of Jamaican Creole (JC) and English in bilingual preschoolers and adults using acoustic duration measures. The aims were to determine if, for JC and English, (a) child and adult acoustic duration characteristics differ, (b) differences occur in preschoolers' duration patterns based on the language spoken, and (c) relationships exist between the preschoolers' personal contextual factors (i.e., age, sex, and percentage of language [%language] exposure and use) and acoustic duration. Data for this cross-sectional study were collected in Kingston, Jamaica, and New York City, New York, United States, during 2013-2019. Participants included typically developing simultaneous bilingual preschoolers (n = 120, ages 3;4-5;11 [years;months]) and adults (n = 15, ages 19;0-54;4) from the same linguistic community. Audio recordings of single-word productions of JC and English were collected through elicited picture-based tasks and used for acoustic analysis. Durational features (voice onset time [VOT], vowel duration, whole-word duration, and the proportion of vowel to whole-word duration) were measured using Praat, a speech analysis software program. JC-English-speaking children demonstrated developing speech motor control through differences in durational patterns compared with adults, including VOT for voiced plosives. Children's VOT, vowel duration, and whole-word duration were produced similarly across JC and English. The contextual factor %language use was predictive of vowel and whole-word duration in English. The findings from this study contribute to a foundation of understanding typical bilingual speech characteristics and motor development as well as schema in JC-English speakers. In particular, minimal acoustic duration differences were observed across the post-Creole continuum, a feature that may be attributed to the JC-English bilingual environment. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.21760469.

Native and non-native language contexts differently modulate mood-driven electrodermal activity

Bilingual speakers have been consistently observed to experience reduced emotional sensitivity to their non-native (L2) relative to native (L1) language, particularly to the negatively-valenced L2 content. Yet, little is known about how the L1 and L2 contexts physiologically influence bilinguals’ affective states, such as moods. Here, we show that bilinguals may be less physiologically sensitive to mood changes in the L2 compared to the L1 context. Polish–English bilinguals operating in either the L1 or the L2 mode (elicited via reading L1 and L2 sentences) watched positive and negative mood-inducing films while their electrodermal activity was measured. We observed a greater number of skin conductance responses in the negative compared to positive mood condition in the L1 context only, indexing decreased sensitivity to mood changes in the L2 relative to the L1 mode in bilinguals. Also, skin conductance amplitudes were overall increased in the L2 compared to the L1 context, pointing to increased cognitive load when operating in L2. These findings together suggest that bilinguals experience decreased sensitivity to mood changes in their less dominant language due to L2 processing requiring greater cognitive engagement.

Requests and apologies in two languages among bilingual speakers: A comparison of heritage English speakers and English- and Hebrew-dominant bilinguals.

Linguistic research over the last two decades has uncovered a significant number of properties that identify heritage language (HL) speakers as a particular phenomenon within bilingualism. However, despite the rapid development of HL research, the sphere of HL speech act pragmatics is still in its infancy. The current study sought to cover part of this gap by investigating both languages of HL adult speakers for whom English is their HL and Hebrew is their dominant societal language (SL; n = 20, hereafter HS) in comparison with two other groups: Hebrew-dominant speakers who were born to Hebrew-speaking families and raised in Israel, and thus English is the language of their schooling (n = 20, hereafter HEB-D), and English-dominant speakers who were born to English-speaking families and immigrated to Israel from an English-speaking country after the age of 18, and thus Hebrew is their L2 (n = 20, hereafter ENG-D). The discourse-pragmatic tasks in English and in Hebrew consisted of the same 36 scenarios eliciting requests and apologies in each language. Each request was followed by an apology that is related. The results indicated that Hebrew-dominant speakers and English-dominant speakers, i.e., HEB-D and ENG-D, had different strategies for the realization of requests and apologies which they systematically transferred from their dominant language into their weaker one, confirming the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences between request and apology realizations in English and in Hebrew. However, the picture was more complex for the HL speakers in their HL-English and SL-Hebrew as in some cases their strategies paired up with the ENG-D in English, and with the HEB-D in Hebrew, while in other cases they developed a unique and hybrid linguistic style reflecting the strategies of both languages. The investigation of both languages of HL speakers enabled us to compare features of the two linguistic systems and make conclusions about their nature.

Grammatikai vonatkozású kontaktusjelenségek a mezőségi nyelvhasználatban

The paper discusses the grammatical aspects of language contact in the language use of Hungarian communities in the Transylvanian Plain on the basis of living language data. The database has been created as part of a larger, more extensive research in the course of which the language shift processes of the Hungarian-Romanian bilingual speakers living in the diasporic communities of the Transylvanian Plain are being analysed and which has been continuously increased in the past three years. The research has been carried out by narrative interviews recorded in nine communities by now, with native Hungarian speakers of different ages who also speak Romanian to a certain extent. These communities have provided a varied field for bilingual researches from a demographical point of view but in terms of linguistic environment and the extent of bilingualism as well. Up to now the language contact researches have mainly been directed towards lexical and phonetical aspects, and for a while they have been extended to semantical aspects too, but as far as grammatical contact phenomena are concerned, we have quite few results at the moment. On basis of the data presented in the paper the analysed phenomena can be explained in certain cases with the influence of the dominant second language, respectively the Romanian, or with the uncertainty rising from the running of two language systems at the same time. The phenomena occuring most often as results of the Romanian language effect are the syntactical phenomena and those regarding word order, the use of plurals in a different way from the standard use, suffix confusions, suffix borrowings, redundancy and missing elements. Redundancy phenomena contain the use of unnecessary articles, special double negation, redundancy of negative particles, missing elements mean the lack of the modal verb in conditional structures. In certain cases, for example at the phenomenon of suffix borrowing, the parallel structures can be found in Romanian as well, so this can be considered language contact phenomenon, just like the lack of modal verbs in conditional structures. Other phenomena, such as the specific SVO word order characteristic of the Romanian language, or specific use of plurals are viewed as relative language contact phenomena, as these can be observed in the language use of monolingual Hungarian speakers too, though more rarely than in the language use of bilinguals. In order to completely understand the processes of language contacts further researches of the grammatical contact phenomena are needed.

Working towards diagnosing bilingual children's language abilities: issues for teachers in Wales

One area of concern within a bilingual context relates to the appropriate ‘diagnostic’ assessment of bilingual children’s language abilities and to the suitable application of their assessment results in practice. Communication and language difficulties are numerous and complex, and manifest themselves in a variety of ways that are captured to different degrees via standardised tests. Such tools are readily available – often in multiple forms – in some languages, such as English, but less readily available in others. This is particularly the case for minority languages such as Welsh, and this poses great difficulty when aiming for a certain type of assessment of specific language abilities. This paper outlines the current state of diagnostic assessment tools for Welsh, with a specific focus on measures of literacy abilities. Drawing on research evidence from the Welsh context, we argue for appropriate training of educators in this area, and for the urgent need to develop tools that are both language and context specific, with relevant bilingual speaker norms, that have practical applications in the classroom, to ensure equitable and relevant diagnosis and support for all children educated in Wales.

Verbal and Visuospatial Working Memory in Arabic-English Female Bilinguals: Is There an Advantage?

This study sheds light on the effect of bilingualism on working memory performance. It aims to investigate whether bilingual speakers have an advantage over monolingual speakers in performing visual-spatial working memory tasks. The present study attempts to be a contribution to the discussion of how working memory performance is affected by bilingualism. It tries to find out whether Arabic-English bilingual speakers have advantages over Arabic monolingual speakers in performing visual-spatial working memory tasks. Two experiments were conducted to test the working memory performance of bilinguals and monolinguals by using verbal and non-verbal tasks. The two measures were completed online; the non-verbal measure involved a picture memorization task, whereas the verbal measure involved word retrieval. Eighty female college students voluntarily participated in the study. Half were Arabic-English bilinguals, and the other half were Arabic monolinguals. Both groups were divided into two subgroups; half performed a non-verbal working memory task, and the other half participated in a verbal working memory task. The results showed no advantages for bilinguals in the picture memorization task. However, a bilingual advantage was found in the verbal working memory task in which bilingual speakers performed better in word retrieval compared to monolingual speakers. The findings indicate a positive effect of bilingualism on working memory performance, particularly in the visual-spatial component.

The role of L1-L2 dissimilarity in L2 segment learning - Implications from the acquisition of English post-alveolar fricatives by Mandarin and Mandarin/Wu speakers.

This study examines how the concept of L1-L2 dissimilarity should be addressed from a two-way perspective in L2 segment learning, and how it relates to the learning outcomes. We achieved this by investigating the productions of the post-alveolar fricatives /ʃ, ʒ/ by Mandarin and Mandarin/Wu speakers, which were subsequently assessed by native English listeners. In the first experiment, we analyzed the spectral moments of /ʃ, ʒ/ produced by Mandarin monolingual and Mandarin/Wu bilingual speakers to find out how the two groups of speakers pronounced the target segments. In the second experiment, native English listeners were tasked with rating the accentedness of the Mandarin- and Mandarin/Wu-accented /ʃ, ʒ/. Results showed native English listeners scored Mandarin/Wu-accented /ʃ/ as having no accent and Mandarin-accented /ʒ/ as having a heavy accent, indicating that English natives perceived the 'native vs. nonnative' segment dissimilarity differently from Chinese learners of English, and that the L1-L2 dissimilarity perceived from both sides may work together in defining the L2 segment learning outcomes.