Is there a cognitive advantage in inhibition and switching for bilingual children? A systematic review.

Several studies have pointed to beneficial effects of bilingualism on executive functioning. However, observations of these beneficial effects have at times proven difficult to reproduce. Moreover, findings of studies on cognitive effects of bilingualism have been contested altogether. These contradictory outcomes leave the research field of bilingualism at unease. In the present review article, we aim to give a systematic overview of previous research on bilingual advantages in inhibition and switching in children up to the age of 12. Particular attention is paid to the experimental tasks that have been applied and the persistence of possible effects throughout critical and post-critical periods for cognitive development in children. In doing so, the review gives an insight in both the validity and robustness of possible domain-general cognitive effects of bilingualism in children. Terminological issues are also discussed.

Effects of Healthy Aging and Gender on the Electrophysiological Correlates of Semantic Sentence Comprehension: The Development of Dutch Normative Data.

PURPOSE: The clinical use of event-related potentials in patients with language disorders is increasingly acknowledged. For this purpose, normative data should be available. Within this context, healthy aging and gender effects on the electrophysiological correlates of semantic sentence comprehension were investigated. METHOD: One hundred and ten healthy subjects (55 men and 55 women), divided among three age groups (young, middle aged, and elderly), performed a semantic sentence congruity task in the visual modality during electroencephalographic recording. RESULTS: The early visual complex was affected by increasing age as shown by smaller P2 amplitudes in the elderly compared to the young. Moreover, the N400 effect in the elderly was smaller than in the young and was delayed compared to latency measures in both middle-aged and young subjects. The topography of age-related amplitude changes of the N400 effect appeared to be gender specific. The late positive complex effect was increased at frontal electrode sites from middle age on, but this was not statistically significant. No gender effects were detected regarding the early P1, N1, and P2, or the late positive complex effect. CONCLUSION: Especially aging effects were found during semantic sentence comprehension, and this from the level of perceptual processing on. Normative data are now available for clinical use.

GECO-CN: Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus of sentence reading for Chinese-English bilinguals.

The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading.

Therapy-Induced Electrophysiological Changes in Primary Progressive Aphasia: A Preliminary Study.

Aims: This preliminary study aimed to investigate therapy-induced electrophysiological changes in persons with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The investigated event-related potential (ERP) components associated with language processing were the mismatch negativity, P300, N400, and P600. Methods: A linguistic ERP test battery and standardized language assessment were administered in four patients with PPA of which two received speech-language therapy (SLT) and two did not receive therapy. The battery was administered twice with approximately 6 months in between in each patient. The results of the follow-up assessments were compared to the results of the initial assessments. Results: Although the results of the behavioral language assessment remained relatively stable between the initial and follow-up assessments, changes in the mean amplitudes, onset latencies, and duration of the ERP components were found in the four patients. In the two patients that did not receive SLT, an increased delay in 50% and a decreased mean amplitude in 25% of the measured ERP components were found. The electrophysiological changes found in the patients that received SLT were variable. Interestingly, the mismatch negativity and the N400 effect elicited by the categorical priming paradigm were less delayed and had an increased mean amplitude at the follow-up assessment in the patient with the non-fluent variant who received SLT. In this patient, the P600 component was absent at the initial assessment but present at the follow-up assessment. Conclusion: Although no clear patterns in electrophysiological changes between patients who received SLT and patients who did not receive SLT were found by our preliminary study, it seems like the SLT induced improvements or compensation mechanisms in some specific language comprehension processes in the patient with the NFV. The results of this study are still preliminary because only four heterogeneous patients were included. Future studies should include larger patient groups of the three clinical variants because the therapy-induced electrophysiological changes might differ depending on the clinical variant and the underlying pathology.

Expanding horizons of cross-linguistic research on reading: The Multilingual Eye-movement Corpus (MECO).

Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading behavior that are shared and those that vary systematically across languages through an investigation of eye-tracking data from 13 languages recorded during text reading. We begin with reporting a bibliometric analysis of eye-tracking studies showing that the current empirical base is insufficient for cross-linguistic comparisons. We respond to this empirical lacuna by presenting the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), the product of an international multi-lab collaboration. We examine which behavioral indices differentiate between reading in written languages, and which measures are stable across languages. One of the findings is that readers of different languages vary considerably in their skipping rate (i.e., the likelihood of not fixating on a word even once) and that this variability is explained by cross-linguistic differences in word length distributions. In contrast, if readers do not skip a word, they tend to spend a similar average time viewing it. We outline the implications of these findings for theories of reading. We also describe prospective uses of the publicly available MECO data, and its further development plans.

Unlocking adults' implicit statistical learning by cognitive depletion.

Human learning is supported by multiple neural mechanisms that maturate at different rates and interact in mostly cooperative but also sometimes competitive ways. We tested the hypothesis that mature cognitive mechanisms constrain implicit statistical learning mechanisms that contribute to early language acquisition. Specifically, we tested the prediction that depleting cognitive control mechanisms in adults enhances their implicit, auditory word-segmentation abilities. Young adults were exposed to continuous streams of syllables that repeated into hidden novel words while watching a silent film. Afterward, learning was measured in a forced-choice test that contrasted hidden words with nonwords. The participants also had to indicate whether they explicitly recalled the word or not in order to dissociate explicit versus implicit knowledge. We additionally measured electroencephalography during exposure to measure neural entrainment to the repeating words. Engagement of the cognitive mechanisms was manipulated by using two methods. In experiment 1 (n = 36), inhibitory theta-burst stimulation (TBS) was applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or to a control region. In experiment 2 (n = 60), participants performed a dual working-memory task that induced high or low levels of cognitive fatigue. In both experiments, cognitive depletion enhanced word recognition, especially when participants reported low confidence in remembering the words (i.e., when their knowledge was implicit). TBS additionally modulated neural entrainment to the words and syllables. These findings suggest that cognitive depletion improves the acquisition of linguistic knowledge in adults by unlocking implicit statistical learning mechanisms and support the hypothesis that adult language learning is antagonized by higher cognitive mechanisms.

An examination of gender imbalance in Scottish adolescents' vocational interests.

This paper documents Scottish adolescents' vocational interest types. Our research is based on the responses of 1,306 pupils from 18 secondary schools to an empirically verified online interest inventory test. Our results are threefold. First, the structural validity of the test with the Scottish sample is confirmed by evaluating the underlying circumplex structure of Holland's RIASEC vocational interests. Second, gender distribution along the six primary vocational interest dimensions is consistent with the research literature: young men scoring higher on the Realistic vocational interest and young women scoring higher on the Social dimension. Finally, we observe that across dimensions, vocational interests of young women are less diverse than those of young men. We discuss how these dissimilarities could lead to differences in education choice and career decision-making.

Hands Down: Cognate Effects Persist During Written Word Production.

Words that share form and meaning across two or more languages (i.e., cognates) are generally processed faster than control words (non-cognates) by bilinguals speaking these languages. This so-called cognate effect is considered to be a demonstration of language non-selectivity during bilingual lexical access. Still, research up till now has focused mainly on visual and auditory comprehension. For production, research is almost exclusively limited to speech, leaving written production out of the equation. Hence, the goal of the current study was to examine whether bilinguals activate representations from both languages during typewriting. Dutch-English bilinguals completed second-language written sentences with names of displayed pictures. Low-constraint sentences yielded a cognate facilitation effect, whereas high-constraint sentences did not. These findings suggest that co-activation of similar words across languages also occurs during written production, just as in reading and speaking. Also, the interaction effect with sentence constraint shows that grammatical and semantic sentence restrictions may overrule interlingual facilitation effects.

Speech fluency in bilinguals who stutter: Language proficiency and attentional demands as mediating factors.

PURPOSE: The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production. METHODS: Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled speech production task, once in their dominant and once in their non-dominant language. The controlled production task (i.e. a network description task) was carried out once under a full-attention condition and once under a divided-attention condition where a non-linguistic, pitch discrimination task was performed simultaneously. RESULTS: In both the spontaneous and the controlled speech task, bilingual persons who stutter produced more (typical and stuttering-like) disfluencies in their L2 than in their L1. Furthermore, whereas the typical disfluencies increased when attention was directed away from speech production, stuttering-like disfluencies decreased. This effect was however restricted to L2. In addition, L2 proficiency was generally found to be a predicting factor, with higher proficiency leading to fewer disfluencies. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that speaking in a non-dominant language increases both typical and stuttering-like disfluencies in bilingual persons who stutter, but also that these two types of dysfluencies differ regarding their attentional origins. Our findings offer further support for attentional accounts of stuttering and have both theoretical and clinical implications.

Less is more: Depleting cognitive resources enhances language learning abilities in adults.

It is still an unresolved question why adults do not learn languages as effortlessly as children do. We tested the hypothesis that the higher cognitive control abilities in adults interfere with implicit learning mechanisms relevant for language acquisition. Across 2 days, Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite novel syllable strings in which, unannounced to the participants, the allowed position of a phoneme depended on another adjacent phoneme. Their cognitive control system was either depleted or not depleted prior to learning, after performing an individually tailored dual working-memory task under high or low cognitive load. A third group did not perform any cognitive task prior to training. Speech error analyses revealed stronger (and faster) learning of the novel phoneme combination constraints in the cognitively depleted group compared with the other two groups. This indicates that late-developing cognitive control abilities, and in particular attentional control, constitute an important antagonist of implicit learning behavior relevant for language acquisition. These findings offer novel insights into developmental changes in implicit learning mechanisms and how to alter them temporarily in order to improve language skills in adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving reading rate prediction with word length information: Evidence from Dutch.

Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In this study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in non-fiction) instead of 4.6. We collected reading rates of 62 participants reading 12 texts with varying word lengths and examined which change in the English equation accounts for the Dutch findings. We observed that predictions were close to the best-fitting curve as soon as the average English word length was replaced by the average Dutch word length. The equation predicts that Dutch texts with an average word length of 5.1 letters will be read at a rate of 238 words per minute (wpm). Texts with an average word length of 4.5 letters will be read at 270 wpm, and texts with an average word length of 6.0 letters will be read at a rate of 202 wpm. The findings are in line with the assumption that the longer words in Dutch do not slow down silent reading relative to English and that the word length effect observed in each language is due to word processing effort and not to low-level visual factors.

Crime and punishment: Morality judgment in a foreign language.

The current study examined whether use of a foreign language affects the manner in which people evaluate a criminal situation. We employed a range of crime scenarios, for which severity judgment scores were obtained. Crimes that were written in a foreign language were systematically evaluated as less severe compared with the same cases described in the native language. We propose that these differences may be due to attenuated emotional processing in a nonnative language. Crucially, this observed variation in severity judgment may also affect magistrates and police interrogators confronted with crime scenarios formulated in a foreign tongue. This in turn would have inevitable consequences for the penalty they will or will not exact on the suspect. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Protective Influence of Bilingualism on the Recovery of Phonological Input Processing in Aphasia After Stroke.

Language-related potentials are increasingly used to objectify (mal)adaptive neuroplasticity in stroke-related aphasia recovery. Using preattentive [mismatch negativity (MMN)] and attentive (P300) phonologically related paradigms, neuroplasticity in sensory memory and cognitive functioning underlying phonological processing can be investigated. In aphasic patients, MMN amplitudes are generally reduced for speech sounds with a topographic source distribution in the right hemisphere. For P300 amplitudes and latencies, both normal and abnormal results have been reported. The current study investigates the preattentive and attentive phonological discrimination ability in 17 aphasic patients (6 monolinguals and 11 bilinguals, aged 41-71 years) at two timepoints during aphasia recovery. Between the two timepoints, a significant improvement of behavioral language performance in both languages is observed in all patients with the MMN latency at timepoint 1 as a predictive factor for aphasia recovery. In contrast to monolinguals, bilingual aphasic patients have a higher probability to improve their processing speed during rehabilitation, resulting in a shortening of the MMN latency over time, which sometimes progresses toward the normative values.

Category specific recall in acute stroke: a case with letter speech.

Category selective recall in spontaneous speech after stroke has been reported only rarely. We recently described three cases demonstrating transient number speech in the acute stage of left hemispheric stroke and hypothesized a link with multilingualism and mathematical proficiency. In this report, we describe a similar case with a transient episode of utterances of randomly selected letters. Like in the three previous cases, this episode was preceded by a brief stage of mutism and ultimately evolved to Wernicke's aphasia over a period of days. This phenomenon is reviewed with reference to linguistic models and neuroanatomic and neurophysiological correlates.

The effects of vocational interest on study results: Student person - environment fit and program interest diversity.

The extent to which a good person-environment (PE) interest fit between student and study program leads to better study results in higher education is an ongoing debate wherein the role of the study program environment has remained inadequately studied. Unanswered questions include: how diverse study programs are in the interests of their student populations, and how this program interest diversity influences study results, in comparison to individual PE fit? The present study addressed these questions in students (N = 4,635) enrolled in open-access university education. In such an open access system, students are allowed to make study choices without prior limitations based on previous achievement or high stakes testing. Starting from the homogeneity assumption applied to this open access setting, we propose several hypotheses regarding program interest diversity, motivation, student-program interest fit, and study results. Furthermore, we applied a method of measuring interest diversity based on an existing measure of correlational person-environment fit. Results indicated that interest diversity in an open access study environment was low across study programs. Results also showed the variance present in program interest diversity was linked to autonomous and controlled motivation in the programs' student populations. Finally, program interest diversity better explained study results than individual student fit with their program of choice. Indeed, program interest diversity explained up to 44% of the variance in the average program's study results while individual student-program fit hardly predicted study success at all. Educational policy makers should therefore be aware of the importance of both interest fit and interest diversity during the process of study orientation.

Monitoring speech production and comprehension: Where is the second-language delay?

Research on error monitoring suggests that bilingual Dutch-English speakers are slower to correct some speech errors in their second language (L2) as opposed to their first language (L1). But which component of self-monitoring is slowed down in L2, error detection or interruption and repair of the error? This study charted the time course of monitoring in monolingual English speakers and bilingual Dutch-English speakers in language production and language comprehension, with the aim of pinpointing the component(s) of monitoring that cause an L2 disadvantage. First, we asked whether phonological errors are interrupted more slowly in L2. An analysis of data from three speech error elicitation experiments indeed showed that Dutch-English bilinguals were slower to stop speaking after an error had been detected in their L2 (English) than in their L1 (Dutch), at least for interrupted errors. A similar L2 disadvantage was found when comparing the L2 of Dutch-English bilinguals to the L1 of English monolinguals. Second, monolingual English speakers and bilingual Dutch-English speakers performed a picture naming task, a production monitoring task, and a comprehension monitoring task. Bilingual English speakers were slower in naming pictures in their L2 than monolingual English speakers. However, the production monitoring task and comprehension monitoring task yielded comparable response latencies between monolinguals in their L1 and bilinguals in their L2, indicating that monitoring processes in L2 are not generally slower. We suggest that interruption and repair are planned concurrently and that the difficulty of repairing in L2 triggers a slow-down in L2 interruption.

Is there adaptation of speech production after speech perception in bilingual interaction?

In dialogue, speakers tend to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor. Adapting speech production to preceding speech input may be particularly relevant for second language (L2) speakers interacting with native (L1) speakers, as adaptation may facilitate L2 learning. Here we asked whether Dutch-English bilinguals adapt pronunciation of the English phonemes /æ/ and coda /b/ when reading aloud sentences after exposure to native English speech. Additionally, we tested whether social context (presence or absence of a native English confederate) and time lag between perception and production of the phoneme affected adaptation. Participants produced more English-like target words that ended in word-final /b/ after exposure to target phonemes produced by a native speaker, but the participants did not change their production of the phoneme /æ/ after exposure to native /æ/. The native English speaking confederate did not show consistent changes in speech production after exposure to target phonemes produced by L2 speakers. These findings are in line with Gambi and Pickering's simulation theory of phonetic imitation (Gambi & Pickering, 2013). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

How well do word recognition measures correlate? Effects of language context and repeated presentations.

In the present study we assessed the extent to which different word recognition time measures converge, using large databases of lexical decision times and eyetracking measures. We observed a low proportion of shared variance between these measures, which limits the validity of lexical decision times to real-life reading. We further investigated and compared the role of word frequency and length, two important predictors of word-processing latencies in these paradigms, and found that they influenced the measures to different extents. A second analysis of two different eyetracking corpora compared the eyetracking reading times for short paragraphs with those from reading of an entire book. Our results revealed that the correlations between eyetracking reading times of identical words in two different corpora are also low, suggesting that the higher-order language context in which words are presented plays a crucial role. Finally, our findings indicate that lexical decision times better resemble the average processing time of multiple presentations of the same word, across different language contexts.

Does Extreme Language Control Training Improve Cognitive Control? A Comparison of Professional Interpreters, L2 Teachers and Monolinguals.

There is currently a lively debate in the literature whether bilingualism leads to enhanced cognitive control or not. Recent evidence suggests that knowledge of more than one language does not always suffice for the manifestation of a bilingual cognitive control advantage. As a result, ongoing research has focused on modalities of bilingual language use that may interact with the bilingual advantage. In this study, we explored the cognitive control performance of simultaneous interpreters. These highly proficient bilinguals comprehend information in one language while producing in the other language, which is a complex skill requiring high levels of language control. In a first experiment, we compared professional interpreters to monolinguals. Data were collected on interference suppression (flanker task), prepotent response inhibition (Simon task), and short-term memory (digit span task). The results showed that the professional interpreters performed similarly to the monolinguals on all measures. In Experiment 2, we compared professional interpreters to monolinguals and second language teachers. Data were collected on interference suppression (advanced flanker task), prepotent response inhibition (advanced flanker task), attention (advanced flanker task), short-term memory (Hebb repetition paradigm), and updating (n-back task). We found converging evidence for our finding that experience in interpreting may not lead to superior interference suppression, prepotent response inhibition, and short-term memory. In fact, our results showed that the professional interpreters performed similarly to both the monolinguals and the second language teachers on all tested cognitive control measures. We did, however, find anecdotal evidence for a (small) advantage in short-term memory for interpreters relative to monolinguals when analyzing composite scores of both experiments together. Taken together, the results of the current study suggest that interpreter experience does not necessarily lead to general cognitive control advantages. However, there may be small interpreter advantages in short-term memory, suggesting that this might be an important cognitive control aspect of simultaneous interpreting. The results are discussed in the light of ongoing debates about bilingual cognitive control advantages.

The Role of Cognitive Development and Strategic Task Tendencies in the Bilingual Advantage Controversy.

Recent meta-analyses have indicated that the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is not clear-cut. So far, the literature has mainly focussed on behavioral differences and potential differences in strategic task tendencies between monolinguals and bilinguals have been left unexplored. In the present study, two groups of younger and older bilingual Dutch-French children were compared to monolingual controls on a Simon and flanker task. Beside the classical between-group comparison, we also investigated potential differences in strategy choices as indexed by the speed-accuracy trade-off. Whereas we did not find any evidence for an advantage for bilingual over monolingual children, only the bilinguals showed a significant speed-accuracy trade-off across tasks and age groups. Furthermore, in the younger bilingual group, the trade-off effect was only found in the Simon and not the flanker task. These findings suggest that differences in strategy choices can mask variations in performance between bilinguals and monolinguals, and therefore also provide inconsistent findings on the bilingual cognitive control advantage.