French-English Bilinguals Research Articles

Recognising words in three languages: effects of language dominance and language switching

This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is a word or not, regardless of language. Thirty participants (12 French–English bilinguals and 18 French–English–Spanish trilinguals) were recruited for two different experiments. In Experiment 1, 12 bilinguals processed two monolingual lists (L1 and L2) followed by a bilingual list (with L1 and L2 words). The results indicate faster answers and better accuracy for L1 words compared to L2 words in both lists, and a general slowdown of processing in the bilingual list, highlighting language switching effects (switch from L2 to L1 faster than from L1 to L2). In Experiment 2, 18 trilinguals performed successively monolingual (L1, L2 and L3), bilingual (L1L2, L1L3 and L2L3) and trilingual (L1L2L3) lists. The results show a slowdown of word processing as a function of number of languages involved, even for the dominant language (L1). Moreover, a language switching effect was found for all multilingual lists, in larger proportions when the list involves the two weakest languages (L2 and L3). Results are discussed in the light of interactive models of bilingual visual word processing.

Explicit and implicit semantic processing of verb–particle constructions by French–English bilinguals

Verb–particle constructions are a notoriously difficult aspect of English to acquire for second-language (L2) learners. The present study investigated whether L2 English speakers are sensitive to gradations in semantic transparency of verb–particle constructions (e.g.,finish upvs.chew out). French–English bilingual participants (first language: French, second language: English) completed an off-line similarity ratings survey, as well as an on-line masked priming task. Results of the survey showed that bilinguals’ similarity ratings became more native-like as their English proficiency levels increased. Results from the masked priming task showed that response latencies from high, but not low-proficiency bilinguals were similar to those of monolinguals, with mid- and high-similarity verb–particle/verb pairs (e.g.,finish up/finish) producing greater priming than low-similarity pairs (e.g.,chew out/chew). Taken together, the results suggest that L2 English speakers develop both explicit and implicit understanding of the semantic properties of verb–particle constructions, which approximates the sensitivity of native speakers as English proficiency increases.

The representation and processing of identical cognates by late bilinguals: RT and ERP effects

Across the languages of a bilingual, translation equivalents can have the same orthographic form and shared meaning (e.g., TABLE in French and English). How such words, called orthographically identical cognates, are processed and represented in the bilingual brain is not well understood. In the present study, late French–English bilinguals processed such identical cognates and control words in an English lexical decision task. Both behavioral and electrophysiological data were collected. Reaction times to identical cognates were shorter than for non-cognate controls and depended on both English and French frequency. Cognates with a low English frequency showed a larger cognate advantage than those with a high English frequency. In addition, N400 amplitude was found to be sensitive to cognate status and both the English and French frequency of the cognate words. Theoretical consequences for the processing and representation of identical cognates are discussed.

Gender inferences: Grammatical features and their impact on the representation of gender in bilinguals

We investigated the effects of grammatical and stereotypical gender information on the comprehension of human referent role nouns among bilinguals of a grammatical (French) and a natural gender language (English). In a sentence evaluation paradigm, participants judged the acceptability of a gender-specific sentence referring to either a group ofwomenormenfollowing a sentence containing the plural form of a role noun female (e.g., social workers), male (e.g., surgeons) or neutral (e.g., musicians) in stereotypicality. L1 French and L1 English bilinguals were tested both in French and English. The results showed that bilinguals construct mental representations of gender associated with the language of the task they are engaged in, shifting representations as they switch languages. Specifically, in French, representations were male-dominant (i.e., induced by the masculine form), whereas in English, they were stereotype-based. Furthermore, the results showed that the extent to which representations shifted was modulated by participants’ proficiency in their L2, with highly proficient L2 participants resembling native speakers of the L2 and less proficient L2 participants being influenced more by their native language.

Bilingual and monolingual children prefer native-accented speakers

Adults and young children prefer to affiliate with some individuals rather than others. Studies have shown that monolingual children show in-group biases for individuals who speak their native language without a foreign accent (Kinzler et al., 2007). Some studies have suggested that bilingual children are less influenced than monolinguals by language variety when attributing personality traits to different speakers (Anisfeld and Lambert, 1964), which could indicate that bilinguals have fewer in-group biases and perhaps greater social flexibility. However, no previous studies have compared monolingual and bilingual children's reactions to speakers with unfamiliar foreign accents. In the present study, we investigated the social preferences of 5-year-old English and French monolinguals and English-French bilinguals. Contrary to our predictions, both monolingual and bilingual preschoolers preferred to be friends with native-accented speakers over speakers who spoke their dominant language with an unfamiliar foreign accent. This result suggests that both monolingual and bilingual children have strong preferences for in-group members who use a familiar language variety, and that bilingualism does not lead to generalized social flexibility.

Bilingual Effects on Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Role of Language, Cultural Background, and Education

A total of 104 six-year-old children belonging to 4 groups (English monolinguals, Chinese-English bilinguals, French-English bilinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals) were compared on 3 verbal tasks and 1 nonverbal executive control task to examine the generality of the bilingual effects on development. Bilingual groups differed in degree of similarity between languages, cultural background, and language of schooling. On the executive control task, all bilingual groups performed similarly and exceeded monolinguals; on the language tasks the best performance was achieved by bilingual children whose language of instruction was the same as the language of testing and whose languages had more overlap. Thus, executive control outcomes for bilingual children are general but performance on verbal tasks is specific to factors in the bilingual experience.

How pluricentric is the French language? An investigation of attitudes towards Quebec French compared to European French

ABSTRACTThis paper presents the results of a study that employed a questionnaire and a matched-guise experiment to investigate the attitudes that Quebec francophones, anglophones, French-English bilinguals and allophones hold towards Quebec French compared to European French. The findings indicate that attitudes towards Quebec French on the solidarity dimension have improved since the 1980s, while attitudes on the status dimension have remained the same. These findings are interpreted in the context of the burgeoning of Quebecers’ sense of belonging to their society on the one hand, and the tradition of viewing French as a monocentric rather than a pluricentric language on the other hand.

Inhibitory Control and L2 Proficiency Modulate Bilingual Language Production: Evidence from Spontaneous Monologue and Dialogue Speech

Bilingual language production requires that speakers recruit inhibitory control (IC) to optimally balance the activation of more than one linguistic system when they produce speech. Moreover, the amount of IC necessary to maintain an optimal balance is likely to vary across individuals as a function of second language (L2) proficiency and inhibitory capacity, as well as the demands of a particular communicative situation. Here, we investigate how these factors relate to bilingual language production across monologue and dialogue spontaneous speech. In these tasks, 42 English–French and French–English bilinguals produced spontaneous speech in their first language (L1) and their L2, with and without a conversational partner. Participants also completed a separate battery that assessed L2 proficiency and inhibitory capacity. The results showed that L2 vs. L1 production was generally more effortful, as was dialogue vs. monologue speech production although the clarity of what was produced was higher for dialogues vs. monologues. As well, language production effort significantly varied as a function of individual differences in L2 proficiency and inhibitory capacity. Taken together, the overall pattern of findings suggests that both increased L2 proficiency and inhibitory capacity relate to efficient language production during spontaneous monologue and dialogue speech.

A new paradigm for the learning of a second or foreign language: the neurolinguistic approach

This article considers the contribution of research in neuroscience to resolving the question of how to develop communication skills in a second language in an institutional setting. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how the findings of cognitive neuroscience can assist educators to understand the complexity of learning and, as a result, to develop more effective instructional practices. The article begins with a brief description of the two options for the learning of French as a second language currently offered in the Canadian school system and the deficiencies inherent in these programs for a country attempting to foster English-French bilingualism in its anglophone citizens. Secondly, the paradigm underlying the core French option, based on cognitive psychology, is examined and its limitations are discussed. The remainder of the article presents the Neurolinguistic Approach (NLA) as developed by the authors, explaining its bases in cognitive neuroscience, the ensuing five major principles of the approach, with the pedagogical consequences that each one entails. Reference is then made to two classroom applications of the NLA: intensive French implemented widely in Canada and another adaptation implanted in China. After comparing the approach briefly with French immersion, limitations of the NLA are presented, and the article concludes with some directions for future research. The positive results of the practical applications of the NLA indicate the important contribution research in cognitive neuroscience can make to improving learning in a classroom situation.

Bilingual children’s gesture use

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals use more manual gestures than monolinguals (Pika et al., 2006; Nicoladis et al., 2009), suggesting that gestures may facilitate lexical retrieval or may reduce the cognitive load on working memory during speech production. In this study, we tested the generalizability of these findings by comparing the use of gestures in three groups of children (English monolinguals, Mandarin Chinese-English bilinguals, and French-English bilinguals) between 7 and 10 years of age as they retold two short stories about a cartoon. The bilingual children were asked to retell narratives in both languages. The results showed that the French-English bilinguals used significantly more gestures than the Chinese-English bilinguals. With respect to gesture rates accompanying speech in English, the monolinguals did not differ from either bilingual group. The bilingual children’s use of gestures was generally not correlated with our measures of working memory (narrative length and speech rate). These results suggest that culture may be a more important determiner of gesture rate than bilingualism and/or working memory capacity.

Listeners feel the beat: Entrainment to English and French speech rhythms

Can listeners entrain to speech rhythms? Monolingual speakers of English and French and balanced English–French bilinguals tapped along with the beat they perceived in sentences spoken in a stress-timed language, English, and a syllable-timed language, French. All groups of participants tapped more regularly to English than to French utterances. Tapping performance was also influenced by the participants’ native language: English-speaking participants and bilinguals tapped more regularly and at higher metrical levels than did French-speaking participants, suggesting that long-term linguistic experience with a stress-timed language can differentiate speakers’ entrainment to speech rhythm.

Second-language experience and speech-in-noise recognition: Effects of talker–listener accent similarity

Previous work has shown that the intelligibility of speech in noise is degraded if the speaker and listener differ in accent, in particular when there is a disparity between native (L1) and nonnative (L2) accents. This study investigated how this talker-listener interaction is modulated by L2 experience and accent similarity. L1 Southern British English, L1 French listeners with varying L2 English experience, and French-English bilinguals were tested on the recognition of English sentences mixed in speech-shaped noise that was spoken with a range of accents (French, Korean, Northern Irish, and Southern British English). The results demonstrated clear interactions of accent and experience, with the least experienced French speakers being most accurate with French-accented English, but more experienced listeners being most accurate with L1 Southern British English accents. An acoustic similarity metric was applied to the speech productions of the talkers and the listeners, and significant correlations were obtained between accent similarity and sentence intelligibility for pairs of individuals. Overall, the results suggest that L2 experience affects talker-listener accent interactions, altering both the intelligibility of different accents and the selectivity of accent processing.

Do young bilinguals acquire past tense morphology like monolinguals, only later? Evidence from French–English and Chinese–English bilinguals

ABSTRACTPrevious studies have shown that preschool bilingual children lag behind same-aged monolinguals in their production of correct past tense forms. This lag has been attributed to bilinguals' less frequent exposure to either language. If so, bilingual children acquire the past tense like monolinguals, only later. In this study, we compared the English past tense production of Chinese–English bilingual children with a matched sample of French–English bilinguals (5–12 years old). The results showed small but reliable differences in the children's past tense production (e.g., the kinds of errors the children made) that could be attributed to knowledge of the other language. Both groups of children showed equivalent rates of accuracy, suggesting that bilinguals exposed to naturalistic speech acquire the past tense much like monolinguals do, only later and with some effects, most likely morphophonological, from their other language.

Cross-language phonological activation of meaning: evidence from category verification

The study investigated phonological processing in bilingual reading for meaning. English–French and French–English bilinguals performed a category verification task in either their first or second language. Interlingual homophones (words that share phonology across languages but not orthography or meaning) and single language control words served as critical stimuli. The interlingual homophones and their control words were not members of the categories, but their interlingual homophone mates were category members (e.g., A vegetable: shoe, where chou in French means “cabbage”). The bilinguals made more errors and had longer decision latencies on homophones than on their control words, providing evidence for cross-language phonological activation of meaning. Results are discussed with respect to the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (BIA+).

An automated version of the BAT Syntactic Comprehension task for assessing auditory L2 proficiency in healthy adults

Studies of bilingualism sometimes require healthy subjects to be assessed for proficiency at auditory sentence processing in their second language (L2). The Syntactic Comprehension task of the Bilingual Aphasia Test could satisfy this need. For ease and uniformity of application, we automated its English (. The Bilingual Aphasia Test. English version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) and French (. The Bilingual Aphasia Test, French version. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates) versions. Although the Bilingual Aphasia Test is meant to assess neurological disorders affecting language, we hypothesised that ceiling performance in L2 would be rare and L2 errors should be consistent with lack of processing automaticity. Initial data from 13 French–English and 4 English–French bilinguals confirm these expectations. Thus, the automated Syntactic Comprehension task (available online for PC and Mac platforms) is indeed suited to test bilingual English and French proficiency levels in healthy adults.

The effects of grammatical proscription on morphosyntactic change: Auxiliary variation in Franco-American French

The author explores the influence of grammatical proscription on morphosyntactic change (or lack thereof) in two Franco-American communities, based on data gathered through sociolinguistic interviews with French-English bilinguals from Southbridge, Massachusetts and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. A study of the use of passé composé shows that although a great deal of variation exists within the communities, language shift does not appear to be causing rapid linguistic change. The author also finds that, with the exception of community of residence, every social constraint considered was found to exercise a significant influence on variation. The analysis thus indicates that despite the sociolinguistic situation of language shift, the passé composé shows a high degree of resistance to grammatical simplification in both Southbridge and Woonsocket.

Operationalizing and measuring language dominance

The aim of this article is to show how measures of lexical richness (Guiraud, 1954; Malvern, Richards, Chipere, & Durán, 2004) can be used to operationalize and measure language dominance among bilinguals. A typology of bilinguals is proposed based on these measures of lexical richness, and the validity of the typology is then investigated in an empirical study among two groups of bilingual informants with different language dominance profiles (25 Dutch—French bilinguals from Brussels and 24 French—English bilinguals from Paris). The most important advantage of the proposed operationalization is that it allows researchers carry out precise measurements of bilingual ability in languages or language varieties for which no standardized tests exist and that these measures can be calculated on oral data that have been collected in an informal and unobtrusive way, in a naturalistic setting.

Testing asymmetries in noncognate translation priming: Evidence from RTs and ERPs

In this study, English-French bilinguals performed a lexical decision task while reaction times (RTs) and event related potentials (ERPs) were measured to L2 targets, preceded by noncognate L1 translation primes versus L1 unrelated primes (Experiment 1a) and vice versa (Experiment 1b). The prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony was 120 ms. Significant masked translation priming was observed, indicated by faster reaction times and a decreased N400 for translation pairs as opposed to unrelated pairs, both from L1 to L2 (Experiment 1a) and from L2 to L1 (Experiment 1b), with the latter effect being weaker (RTs) and less longer lasting (ERPs). A translation priming effect was also found in the N250 ERP component, and this effect was stronger and earlier in the L2 to L1 priming direction than the reverse. The results are discussed with respect to possible mechanisms at the basis of asymmetric translation priming effects in bilinguals.

Phonetic adaptation in non-native speech: Insights from a distributional analysis of long-lag voice onset time.

Speakers encountering long-lag voice onset time (VOT) for the first time in their L2 produce VOTs between their L1 and L2 values. Native-like long-lag productions are conditioned by speaker competency factors such as age of acquisition and experience, showing significant production differences between late bilinguals, early bilinguals, and native L2 speakers. Thus far, analyses have focused on average VOTs across speaker groups. This project investigates the full distributional properties of VOT in bilinguals (e.g., variation and skewness) in addition to averages, providing a more informative picture of bilingual acquisition. VOT production data were collected from French-English bilinguals (age of English onset 0–15 years) and submitted to a distribution-based analysis. Results show that while speaker groups differ predictably in mean VOT, the analysis discovers subgroups based on common production behaviors, eliminating the gross categorizations of early and late bilinguals and moving toward gradual, predictable shapes of VOT that are correlated with English schooling, time in an English-speaking country, and age of acquisition. Ultimately, these results may fill in some missing blanks between perception and production, suggesting, for example, that differences in perceived accent and comprehensibility diverge due to degree of overlap with native L2 VOTs.

The role of semantics in translation recognition: effects of number of translations, dominance of translations and semantic relatedness of multiple translations

This study aims to examine the influence of multiple translations of a word on bilingual processing in three translation recognition experiments during which French–English bilinguals had to decide whether two words were translations of each other or not. In the first experiment, words with only one translation were recognized as translations faster than words with multiple translations. Furthermore, when words were presented with their dominant translation, the recognition process was faster than when words were presented with their non-dominant translation. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated in both directions of translation (L1–L2 and L2–L1). In Experiment 3, we manipulated number-of-translations and the semantic relatedness between the different translations of a word. When the two translations of a word (i.e., bateau) were related in meaning (synonyms such as the English translations boat and ship), the translation recognition process was faster than when the two translations of a word (i.e., argent) were unrelated in meaning (the two translations money and silver). The consequences of translation ambiguities are discussed in the light of the distributed conceptual feature model of bilingual memory (De Groot, 1992b; Van Hell and De Groot, 1998b).