Impact Of Language Experience Research Articles

Exploring audiovisual speech perception in monolingual and bilingual children in Uzbekistan

This study aimed to investigate the development of audiovisual speech perception in monolingual Uzbek-speaking and bilingual Uzbek–Russian-speaking children, focusing on the impact of language experience on audiovisual speech perception and the role of visual phonetic (i.e., mouth movements corresponding to phonetic/lexical information) and temporal (i.e., timing of speech signals) cues. A total of 321 children aged 4 to 10 years in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, discriminated /ba/ and /da/ syllables across three conditions: auditory-only, audiovisual phonetic (i.e., sound accompanied by mouth movements), and audiovisual temporal (i.e., sound onset/offset accompanied by mouth opening/closing). Effects of modality (audiovisual phonetic, audiovisual temporal, or audio-only cues), age, group (monolingual or bilingual), and their interactions were tested using a Bayesian regression model. Overall, older participants performed better than younger participants. Participants performed better in the audiovisual phonetic modality compared with the auditory modality. However, no significant difference between monolingual and bilingual children was observed across all modalities. This finding stands in contrast to earlier studies. We attribute the contrasting findings of our study and the existing literature to the cross-linguistic similarity of the language pairs involved. When the languages spoken by bilinguals exhibit substantial linguistic similarity, there may be an increased necessity to disambiguate speech signals, leading to a greater reliance on audiovisual cues. The limited phonological similarity between Uzbek and Russian might have minimized bilinguals’ need to rely on visual speech cues, contributing to the lack of group differences in our study.

Language Experience Modulates the Visual N200 Response for Disyllabic Chinese Words: An Event-Related Potential Study.

Prior event-related potential (ERP) research on how the brain processes non-alphabetic scripts like Chinese has identified an N200 component related to early visual processing of Chinese disyllabic words. An enhanced N200 response was observed when similar prime-target pairs were presented, but it was not elicited when native Chinese speakers read Korean Hangul, a script resembling Chinese characters. This led to the proposal that N200 was not a universal marker for orthographic processing but rather specific and unique to Chinese. However, there was uncertainty due to the absence of Korean participants in the previous research. The impact of language experience on N200 remains unclear. To address this, the present pilot ERP study included three adult groups (totaling 30 participants) with varying language proficiency levels. The participants judged if randomly presented words were Chinese or Korean, while the ERP responses were recorded. The behavioral data showed high accuracy across the groups. The reaction times differed between the groups with the native speakers responding faster. The N200 patterns varied across the groups. Both Chinese native speakers and Chinese-as-second-language learners showed stronger N200 responses for Chinese words compared to Korean words regardless of whether an adaptive or a fixed-time window was used for the N200 quantification, but this was not the case for Korean native speakers. Our cross-linguistic study suggests that N200 is not exclusive to Chinese orthography. Instead, it reflects general visual processing sensitive to both orthographic features and learning experience.

Phrase parsing in a second language as indexed by the closure positive shift: The impact of language experience and acoustic cue salience.

Despite the importance of prosodic processing in utterance parsing, a majority of studies investigating boundary localization in a second language focus on word segmentation. The goal of the present study was to investigate the parsing of phrase boundaries in first and second languages from different prosodic typologies (stress-timed vs. syllable-timed). Fifty English-French bilingual adults who varied in native language (French or English) and second language proficiency listened to English and French utterances with different prosodic structures while event-related brain potentials were recorded. The utterances were built around target words presented either in phrase-final position (bearing phrase-final lengthening) or in penultimate position. Each participant listened to both English and French stimuli, providing data in their native language (used as reference) and their second language. Target words in phrase-final position elicited closure positive shifts across listeners in both languages, regardless of the language-specific acoustic cues associated with phrase-final lengthening (shorter phrase-final lengthening in English compared to French). Interestingly, directional effects were observed, where learning to parse English as a second language in a native-like manner seemed to require a higher proficiency level than learning to parse French as a second language. This pattern of results supports the idea that L2 listeners need to learn to recognize L2-specific phrase-final lengthening regardless of the apparent similarity across languages and that some language combinations might present greater challenges than others.

Impact of Language Experience on Attention to Faces in Infancy: Evidence From Unimodal and Bimodal Bilingual Infants.

Faces capture and maintain infants’ attention more than other visual stimuli. The present study addresses the impact of early language experience on attention to faces in infancy. It was hypothesized that infants learning two spoken languages (unimodal bilinguals) and hearing infants of Deaf mothers learning British Sign Language and spoken English (bimodal bilinguals) would show enhanced attention to faces compared to monolinguals. The comparison between unimodal and bimodal bilinguals allowed differentiation of the effects of learning two languages, from the effects of increased visual communication in hearing infants of Deaf mothers. Data are presented for two independent samples of infants: Sample 1 included 49 infants between 7 and 10 months (26 monolinguals and 23 unimodal bilinguals), and Sample 2 included 87 infants between 4 and 8 months (32 monolinguals, 25 unimodal bilinguals, and 30 bimodal bilingual infants with a Deaf mother). Eye-tracking was used to analyze infants’ visual scanning of complex arrays including a face and four other stimulus categories. Infants from 4 to 10 months (all groups combined) directed their attention to faces faster than to non-face stimuli (i.e., attention capture), directed more fixations to, and looked longer at faces than non-face stimuli (i.e., attention maintenance). Unimodal bilinguals demonstrated increased attention capture and attention maintenance by faces compared to monolinguals. Contrary to predictions, bimodal bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in attention capture and maintenance by face stimuli. These results are discussed in relation to the language experience of each group and the close association between face processing and language development in social communication.

The Impact of Language Experience on Language and Reading

This article reviews the important role of statistical learning for language and reading development. Although statistical learning—the unconscious encoding of patterns in language input—has become widely known as a force in infants' early interpretation of speech, the role of this kind of learning for language and reading comprehension in children has received less attention. In fact, the implicit learning of co-occurrences of words, sentence structures, and other components of language forms a critical part of children's language comprehension and fluent reading. Beyond introducing basic information about language statistics, the article offers a discussion of how variability in the amount and nature of language experience can affect language development and literacy, including variation owing to the amount of language input in the child's linguistic environment and the variable nature of input for children who are exposed to multiple languages or multiple dialects.

Exploring EFL Learners' Preferences, Perceived Needs, and Perceptions about Language Learning Strategies

This study was to investigate the impact of language experience and academic level on the perceived needs of Iranian undergraduate EFL learners. Two groups of Iranian TEFL female students (freshmen and senior) were compared regarding their preferences, perceived needs and perceptions of different activity types about language learning. To collect data, Sihong's (2007) needs analysis questionnaire for English language needs was utilized. Thirty two freshman and twenty nine senior MA students with the age range of 25-35 were considered as the subject of this study. They were asked to fill out the questionnaire through email and they were given the confidence that the collected data would remain anonymous. Results revealed that there was a significant difference between freshman and senior EFL learners in their preferences, needs and opinions about various types of activities, and various aspects of language education. The findings also revealed that freshmen students required more practice in grammar and pronunciation than vocabulary for them. The most difficult components of language were pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar respectively; however, the senior students reported that vocabulary and grammar were the most difficult component of language skill and pronunciation was the least one.

The Dynamic Neural Network and Its Development of Visual Word Processing

Investigating the dynamic neural network of cognitive processing is the new approach of cognitive neuroscience.This project proposes a series of fMRI experiments to investigate the function role of visual word form area(VWFA)at left middle part of fusiform gyrus,and further investigates the neural network of visual word processing and its development.Taking advantage of the specific properties of Chinese writing system,the first study will examine the activations of VWFA both under the task demands and the stimuli-driven.The interaction among VWFA,phonological and semantic areas will be tested to show the dynamic activation of brain regions involved in visual words processing.The second study investigates how the language experience shapes the development of brain network of visual words processing,by combining the experiments on English-speaker and Chinese Children.The third study conducts multivariate analysis on data from functional imaging,resting state and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).The function and effective connectivity among visual,phonological and semantic processing areas will be used to construct the neurobiological model of visual words processing,and further to show the impact of language experience on its development.

Performance of South African Adolescents on Two Versions of the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test

In South Africa the multicultural and multilinguistic nature of society has impacted on the cultural appropriateness of psychological tests. In the assessment of memory and learning, tasks such as the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) are widely used although they may not be standardised for the South African context. We investigated how South African learners performed on the RAVLT as well as on an adapted version of this test, the South African List Learning Test (SALLT). The impact of language differences on performance was also noted. Subjects were 54 first (L1) and second language (L2) English speaking secondary school learners. Results indicated that South African learners achieved a higher level of recall on the SALLT than on the Euro-American RAVLT. Findings confirmed the impact of language experience on performance and highlight the necessity for the development and standardisation of culturally relevant psychological tests in South Africa.