How Do French-English Bilinguals Pull Verb Particle Constructions Off? Factors Influencing Second Language Processing of Unfamiliar Structures at the Syntax-Semantics Interface.

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of VPCs (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g., The professor looked the student's last name up). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals' reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with VPCs that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers' reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants' English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants' explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty.

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross-modal priming study.

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English-speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime-target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly-bell), moderate (e.g., lately-late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly-bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach-spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage-trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.

Speech articulation performance of francophone children in the early school years: norming of the Test de Dépistage Francophone de Phonologie.

Good quality normative data are essential for clinical practice in speech-language pathology but are largely lacking for French-speaking children. We investigated speech production accuracy by French-speaking children attending kindergarten (maternelle) and first grade (première année). The study aimed to provide normative data for a new screening test - the Test de Dépistage Francophone de Phonologie. Sixty-one children named 30 pictures depicting words selected to be representative of the distribution of phonemes, syllable shapes and word lengths characteristic of Québec French. Percent consonants' correct was approximately 90% and did not change significantly with age although younger children produced significantly more syllable structure errors than older children. Given that the word set reflects the segmental and prosodic characteristics of spoken Québec French, and that ceiling effects were not observed, these results further indicate that phonological development is not complete by the age of seven years in French-speaking children.

A common mechanism in verb and noun naming deficits in Alzheimer's patients.

We tested the ability of Alzheimer's patients and elderly controls to name living and non-living nouns, and manner and instrument verbs. Patients' error patterns and relative performance with different categories showed evidence of graceful degradation for both nouns and verbs, with particular domain-specific impairments for living nouns and instrument verbs. Our results support feature-based, semantic representations for nouns and verbs and support the role of inter-correlated features in noun impairment, and the role of noun knowledge in instrument verb impairment.

Graded semantic and phonological similarity effects in priming: evidence for a distributed connectionist approach to morphology.

A considerable body of empirical and theoretical research suggests that morphological structure governs the representation of words in memory and that many words are decomposed into morphological components in processing. The authors investigated an alternative approach in which morphology arises from the interaction of semantic and phonological codes. A series of cross-modal lexical decision experiments shows that the magnitude of priming reflects the degree of semantic and phonological overlap between words. Crucially, moderately similar items produce intermediate facilitation (e.g., lately-late). This pattern is observed for word pairs exhibiting different types of morphological relationships, including suffixed-stem (e.g., teacher-teach), suffixed-suffixed (e.g., saintly-sainthood), and prefixed-stem pairs (preheat-heat). The results can be understood in terms of connectionist models that use distributed representations rather than discrete morphemes.

The role of the posterior fusiform gyrus in reading.

Studies of skilled reading [Price, C. J., & Mechelli, A. Reading and reading disturbance. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 15, 231-238, 2005], its acquisition in children [Shaywitz, B. A., Shaywitz, S. E., Pugh, K. R., Mencl, W. E., Fulbright, R. K., Skudlarski, P., et al. Disruption of posterior brain systems for reading in children with developmental dyslexia. Biological Psychiatry, 52, 101-110, 2002; Turkeltaub, P. E., Gareau, L., Flowers, D. L., Zeffiro, T. A., & Eden, G. F. Development of neural mechanisms for reading. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 767-773, 2003], and its impairment in patients with pure alexia [Leff, A. P., Crewes, H., Plant, G. T., Scott, S. K., Kennard, C., & Wise, R. J. The functional anatomy of single word reading in patients with hemianopic and pure alexia. Brain, 124, 510-521, 2001] all highlight the importance of the left posterior fusiform cortex in visual word recognition. We used visual masked priming and functional magnetic resonance imaging to elucidate the specific functional contribution of this region to reading and found that (1) unlike words, repetition of pseudowords ("solst-solst") did not produce a neural priming effect in this region, (2) orthographically related words such as "corner-corn" did produce a neural priming effect, but (3) this orthographic priming effect was reduced when prime-target pairs were semantically related ("teacher-teach"). These findings conflict with the notion of stored visual word forms and instead suggest that this region acts as an interface between visual form information and higher order stimulus properties such as its associated sound and meaning. More importantly, this function is not specific to reading but is also engaged when processing any meaningful visual stimulus.

Information content versus relational knowledge: semantic deficits in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Studies of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have yielded conflicting results, some finding evidence of considerable deficits, others finding that semantic knowledge is relatively intact. How do we reconcile findings from picture naming tasks that seem to indicate semantic impairment in AD with results from certain sorting tasks that suggest intact semantics? To investigate the basis of the contradictory results described above, we conducted a study using two types of tasks: (1) picture naming; and (2) board sorting. The board sorting task we used is a simultaneous similarity judgment task, in which participants are asked to place more similar concepts closer together and less similar ones farther apart. We compared the performance of AD patients on these two tasks, using a number of different analyses that yield very different patterns of results. Our results indicate that whether patients show impairment or not depends on both the nature of the task and the subsequent analysis chosen. Specifically, tasks and analyses that focus on relational knowledge (e.g., dog is more related to cat than to camel) lead to different conclusions than those based on specific information about individual items. These findings suggest that the board sorting method, when coupled with multiple analyses, provides a more complete picture of the underlying semantic deficit in AD than previous studies have shown.

Morphology and the internal structure of words.

Morphology is the aspect of language concerned with the internal structure of words, and languages vary in the extent to which they rely on morphological structure. Consequently, it is not clear whether morphology is a basic element of a linguistic structure or whether it emerges from systematic regularities between the form and meaning of words. Here, we looked for evidence of morphological structure at a neural systems level by using a visual masked priming paradigm and functional MRI. Form and meaning relations were manipulated in a 2 x 2 design to identify reductions in blood oxygenation level-dependent signal related to shared form (e.g., corner-corn), shared meaning (e.g., idea-notion), and shared morphemes (e.g., boldly-bold, which overlapped in both form and meaning). Relative to unrelated pairs (e.g., ozone-hero), morphologically related items reduced blood oxygenation level-dependent signal in the posterior angular gyrus bilaterally, left occipitotemporal cortex, and left middle temporal gyrus. In the posterior angular gyrus, a neural priming effect was observed for all three priming conditions, possibly reflecting reduced attentional demands rather than overlapping linguistic representations per se. In contrast, the reductions seen in the left occipitotemporal cortex and left middle temporal gyrus corresponded, respectively, to main effects of orthographic and semantic overlap. As neural regions sensitive to morphological structure overlapped almost entirely with regions sensitive to orthographic and semantic relatedness, our results suggest that morphology emerges from the convergence of form and meaning.