Implications For Language Processing Research Articles

Codeswitching: A Bilingual Toolkit for Opportunistic Speech Planning.

The ability to engage in fluent codeswitching is a hallmark of the flexibility and creativity of bilingual language use. Recent discoveries have changed the way we think about codeswitching and its implications for language processing and language control. One is that codeswitching is not haphazard, but subject to unique linguistic and cognitive constraints. Another is that not all bilinguals codeswitch, but those who do, exhibit usage patterns conforming to community-based norms. However, less is known about the cognitive processes that regulate and promote the likelihood of codeswitched speech. We review recent empirical studies and provide corpus evidence that highlight how codeswitching serves as an opportunistic strategy for optimizing performance in cooperative communication. From this perspective, codeswitching is part and parcel of a toolkit available to bilingual codeswitching speakers to assist in language production by allowing both languages to remain active and accessible, and therefore providing an alternative means to convey meaning, with implications for bilingual speech planning and language control more generally.

Squeezing through the Now-or-Never bottleneck: Reconnecting language processing, acquisition, change, and structure.

If human language must be squeezed through a narrow cognitive bottleneck, what are the implications for language processing, acquisition, change, and structure? In our target article, we suggested that the implications are far-reaching and form the basis of an integrated account of many apparently unconnected aspects of language and language processing, as well as suggesting revision of many existing theoretical accounts. With some exceptions, commentators were generally supportive both of the existence of the bottleneck and its potential implications. Many commentators suggested additional theoretical and linguistic nuances and extensions, links with prior work, and relevant computational and neuroscientific considerations; some argued for related but distinct viewpoints; a few, though, felt traditional perspectives were being abandoned too readily. Our response attempts to build on the many suggestions raised by the commentators and to engage constructively with challenges to our approach.

On the phonological status of Spanish compound words

Primarily inspired by Bustos de Gisbert (1986) , Hualde (2006/2007 ), and Moyna (2011) , specifically by their comments on stress deletion in the left members of some Spanish compounds, the current investigation fills a gap in this field by conducting an acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency evidence of stress in Spanish compounds and phonologically classifying them through the Autosegmental-Metrical model. Using a data elicitation task of 30 noun+noun compounds demonstrating syntactic, semantic, orthographic, and phonological variation, eight speakers of Mexican Spanish recorded two iterations of each compound, which is embedded at the beginning or at the end of a declarative carrier phrase. The acoustic analysis reveals that, as expected, right members categorically exhibit F0 evidence of stress. However, only the 15 compounds written as two orthographic units show strong evidence of left stress. This is especially so in utterance-initial position. The number of unstressed syllables between left and right stresses determines the tonal sequences produced in left members. In compounds spelled as two orthographic units, the phonological targets of each member resemble those of two simple content words in broad focus declaratives. Evidence of left stress in orthographically united compounds occurs in less than 20% of cases, and these are viewed as carrying postlexical secondary stress. The tonal sequences of this group are more wide-ranging than those of the first group. The results have implications for language processing and raise questions for the study of compound stress in Spanish.

Interdisciplinary and intercultural differences in learning strategy use: implications for language processing, curriculum and instruction

This investigation examines English as foreign language college interdisciplinary and intercultural differences in learning strategy use and their implications for language processing. Positivism underpins this research at the levels of ontology (standardized variables), epistemology (detachment from the subjects) and methodology, using nomothetic research strategy (survey), instruments (questionnaires) and data analysis techniques (multivariate analysis of variance and analysis of variance). Main findings show interdisciplinary differences between the Humanities and Science majors in student use of compensation strategies in favour of the Science major while finding no intermajor differences in student use of other strategies. The findings indicate no ethnic differences in learning strategy use, since European, American and Eastern ethnicities almost use typical strategies. Therefore, disagreements on alleged unmediated deterministic relationships between ethnicity and cognitive processing remain in place. Instead, curriculum and instructional designs, strategy training and individual differences rather than cultural stereotypes influence language processing. For curriculum and instructional designs to facilitate language processing and pedagogy, effective strategies should underlie national, classroom-level and school-level curriculum developments.

The Benefits of Executive Control Training and the Implications for Language Processing

Recent psycholinguistics research suggests that the executive function (EF) skill known as conflict resolution – the ability to adjust behavior in the service of resolving among incompatible representations – is important for several language processing tasks such as lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution, verbal fluency, and common-ground assessment. Here, we discuss work showing that various EF skills can be enhanced through consistent practice with working-memory tasks that tap these EFs, and, moreover, that improvements on the training tasks transfer across domains to novel tasks that may rely on shared underlying EFs. These findings have implications for language processing and could launch new research exploring if EF training, within a “process-specific” framework, could be used as a remediation tool for improving general language use. Indeed, work in our lab demonstrates that EF training that increases conflict-resolution processes has selective benefits on an untrained sentence-processing task requiring syntactic ambiguity resolution, which relies on shared conflict-resolution functions. Given claims that conflict-resolution abilities contribute to a range of linguistic skills, EF training targeting this process could theoretically yield wider performance gains beyond garden-path recovery. We offer some hypotheses on the potential benefits of EF training as a component of interventions to mitigate general difficulties in language processing. However, there are caveats to consider as well, which we also address.

The influence of type and token frequency on the acquisition of affixation patterns: Implications for language processing.

Rules, and exceptions to such rules, are ubiquitous in many domains, including language. Here we used simple artificial grammars to investigate the influence of 2 factors on the acquisition of rules and their exceptions, namely type frequency (the relative numbers of different exceptions to different regular items) and token frequency (the number of exception tokens relative to the number of regular tokens). We familiarized participants to either a prefixation pattern (where regulars started with /ZaI/ and exceptions ended with /ZaI/) or a suffixation pattern (where regulars ended with /ZaI/ and exceptions started with /ZaI/). We show that the type and the token frequency of regular items and exceptions influence in different ways what participants can learn. For the exceptions to be learned, they have to occur sufficiently often so that participants can memorize them; this can be achieved by a high token frequency. However, a high token frequency of the exceptions also impaired the acquisition of the regular pattern. In contrast, the type frequency of the patterns seemed to determine whether the regular pattern could be learned: When the type frequency of the regular items was sufficiently high, participants successfully learned the regular pattern even when the exceptions were played so often that 66% of the familiarization items were exceptions. We discuss these findings in the context of general learning mechanisms and the role they may play in language acquisition.

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Type and Token Frequency on the Acquisition of Affixation Patterns: Implications for Language Processing

Supplemental Material for The Influence of Type and Token Frequency on the Acquisition of Affixation Patterns: Implications for Language Processing

Short Article: Semantic Anomalies at the Borderline of Consciousness: An Eye-Tracking Investigation

We report an eye-tracking study in which participants read passages containing difficult-to-detect semantic anomalies. Would there be any evidence of the registration of the anomaly within the comprehension system (reflected in eye tracking) when anomalies were not noticed? Using early and late processing measures, there was no evidence for registration independent of conscious detection. Comparisons were made between detected and undetected anomalies and between these and nonanomalous controls. There was evidence of disruption to the tracking measures only when a conscious report was also made. These data fit the view that shallow semantic processing underlies the failure to detect anomalies. Implications for language processing are discussed.

Using neuroimaging to evaluate models of working memory and their implications for language processing

The precise relationships that exist between verbal working memory and language processing remain underdetermined. We argue that while neuroimaging methods have the potential to provide important insights into the links between these two cognitive domains, an over-reliance on a single theoretical perspective has stunted progress toward this end. Specifically, neuroimaging studies in the domain of working memory have relied heavily on the theoretical framework provided by Baddeley's Multiple-Component Model. We reexamine the sufficiency of this model in accounting for a range of neuroimaging evidence, and draw attention to a set of findings that are not readily explained by a conventional mapping of this model onto specific neuroanatomical substrates. An alternative framework provided by Cowan's Embedded-Processes Model is then evaluated, and we conclude that this alternative view supports a reconceptualization of the contributions of Broca's area and the left inferior parietal cortex to working memory that can account for a wide range of findings. Importantly, this alternative account suggests links between working memory and language that are not afforded by currently prevailing interpretations.

Departures in the spoken narratives of normal and language-disordered children

ABSTRACTThe spoken narratives of 38 normal and language-disordered children (CA 7;6–10;6) were analyzed by describing their departures from the original text during recall. The narrative texts were presented to an adult listener following each child's viewing of a 35-minute film. The following departure types were compared across groups: (a) acceptable departures from the original text meaning, (b) unacceptable departures from the original text meaning, (c) grammatical departures (i.e., agrammatical utterances), (d) exact repetitions of words or phrases, (e) unacceptable departures from the text's meaning correctly repaired, (f) unacceptable departures from the text meaning incorrectly repaired, (g) departures from text meaning left unrepaired, and (h) repaired grammatical departures. Results indicated that both groups used a higher rate of acceptable departures from the original text meaning than any other departure type, with the normal children producing a higher rate of acceptable departures and a lower rate of unacceptable grammatical departures. Both groups repaired fewer unacceptable grammatical departures than unacceptable departures from text meaning. The groups did not differ in their tendency to ignore grammatical departures. Implications for language processing in narrative discourse are discussed.