Bilingual lexical selection as a dynamic process: Evidence from Arabic-French bilinguals.

The nature of the lexical selection process in bilingual spoken word production is one of the pending questions of research on bilingualism. According to one view this competitive process is language-specific, while another holds that it is language-nonspecific (i.e., lexical competition is cross-linguistic). In recent years, research on bilingual language production has seen the rise of a third view that postulates that lexical selection is in fact dynamic and may function as language-specific or nonspecific depending on a number of factors. The aim of the present study was to investigate the lexical selection process among moderately proficient bilinguals whose two languages are typologically distant: Tunisian Arabic and French. The picture-word interference task was used in two experiments where moderately proficient Tunisian Arabic (L1)-French (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures in their L2 while ignoring auditory distractors (semantic, phono-translation, phonological, or unrelated) in their L2 (Experiment 1) or their L1 (Experiment 2). Thus, the language context was entirely monolingual in Experiment 1 and bilingual in Experiment 2. In Experiment 1, only a phonological facilitation effect was observed. In Experiment 2, interference was found in the phono-translation, semantic, and phonological conditions. Taken together, these results indicate that cross-language competition occurs among moderately proficient Tunisian Arabic-French bilinguals only in a bilingual context (Experiment 2) as indexed by the phono-translation interference effect observed. Our findings are in line with the recent hypothesis that lexical selection is a dynamic process modulated by factors like language similarity, language proficiency, and the experimental language context.

Gavagai is as Gavagai does: learning nouns and verbs from cross-situational statistics.

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning.

Effects of feedforward and feedback consistency on reading and spelling in dyslexia.

We investigated the effects of rime consistency on reading and spelling among dyslexic children and a group of matched reading age skilled readers by manipulating consistency of orthography-tophonology (OP) mappings and consistency of mappings from phonology-to-orthography (PO). For both dyslexic and control children we found feedforward consistency effects on reading (O->P) and spelling (P->O) and feedback (O->P) consistency effects on spelling. Dyslexic children demonstrated feedback (PO) consistency effects in reading but control children did not. Our results challenge accounts of reading and spelling in dyslexia that assume feedforward consistency effects alone. We consider the implications of these results in relation to theories in which children may assess candidate responses for goodness of fit to prior expectations. We discuss the wider implications of our results for the assessment and remediation of dyslexia.