Grammatical Gender in Spoken Word Recognition in School-Age Spanish-English Bilingual Children.

This study investigated grammatical gender processing in school-age Spanish-English bilingual children using a visual world paradigm with a 4-picture display where the target noun was heard with a gendered article that was either in a context where all distractor images were the same gender as the target noun (same gender; uninformative) or in a context where all distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender; informative). We investigated 32 bilingual children (ages 5;6-8;6) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy and began learning English by school entry. Along with the eye-tracking experiment, all children participated in a standardized language assessment and told narratives in English and Spanish, and parents reported on their child's current Spanish language use. The differential proportion fixations to target (target - averaged distractor fixations) were analyzed in two time regions with linear mixed-effects models (LME). Results show that prior to the target word being spoken, these bilingual children did not use the gendered articles to actively anticipate upcoming nouns. In the subsequent time region (during the noun), it was shown that there are differences in the way they use feminine and masculine articles, with a lack of use of the masculine article and a potential facilitatory use of the feminine article for children who currently use more Spanish than English. This asymmetry in the use of gendered articles in processing is modulated by current Spanish language use and trends with results found for bilingual and second-language learning adults.

The influence of PTSD symptoms on selective visual attention while reading.

A large body of research has provided evidence that Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms are associated with broad changes in attentional processes which are in turn implicated in core facets of emotion regulation. However, prior research has primarily focused on specific task-based evaluations of attention. In the current study, we evaluated eye movement behaviour among adults that endorsed a traumatic event meeting Criterion A and were experiencing a range of PTSD symptoms (N = 55) while they read short trauma-related or neutral passages. We found evidence that PTSD symptoms were associated with a small difference in attentional processes between the two types of passages, with longer first fixations to words in trauma-related passages b = 1.92, 95% CI [0.31, 3.56]. Moreover, within the trauma-related texts we found that greater PTSD symptoms were associated with longer total fixation times b = 9.53, 95% CI [2.20, 16.83] and a greater number of regressions b = 0.07, 95% CI [0.01,0.13] to trauma-related words. Inclusion of an additional 25 participants not endorsing a trauma that met Criterion A did not influence the results in any meaningful way. For the first time, we provide evidence that PTSD symptoms are linked to bias for trauma-related information during a naturalistic, everyday activity - reading.

Performance Differences Between Native and Non-Native Speakers on a New Happy-Sad Executive Function Measure.

OBJECTIVE: The happy-sad task adapts the classic day-night task by incorporating two early acquired emotional concepts ("happy" and "sad") and demonstrates elevated inhibitory demands for native speakers. The task holds promise as a new executive function measure for assessing inhibitory control across the lifespan, but no studies have examined the influence of language of test administration on performance. METHOD: Seventy adult native English speakers and 50 non-native speakers completed the computerized day-night and the new happy-sad tasks administered in English. In two conditions, participants were categorized pictorial stimuli either in a congruent manner ("happy" for a happy face) or in a more challenging, incongruent manner ("sad" for a happy face). Lexical decision performance was obtained to estimate levels of English language proficiency. RESULTS: Native speakers and non-native speakers performed comparably except for the critical incongruent condition of the happy-sad task, where native speakers responded more slowly. A greater congruency effect for the happy-sad task was found for native than for non-native speakers. Lexical decision performance was associated with performance on the challenging incongruent conditions. CONCLUSION: This study reinforced the usefulness of the happy-sad task as a new measure in evaluating inhibitory control in adult native-speakers. However, the language of test administration needs to be considered in assessment because it may lead to performance differences between native and non-native speakers.

Executive Control in Adults Who Stutter: The Antisaccade Task.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate executive control in adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (AWNS) via a nonspeech paradigm, wherein eye movements were monitored (i.e., antisaccade task). Processes involved in an antisaccade task include working memory, attention, and voluntary motor control, but the task primarily provides insight into inhibitory control. Method Seventeen AWS (14 men, three women; M = 23.41 years) and 17 AWNS (M = 23.29 years) were presented with a combination of prosaccade (i.e., looking toward a target) and antisaccade (i.e., suppress a reflexive saccade toward the target and look in the opposite direction) trials. The distance of the target from the center of the screen was also manipulated (i.e., 5.5o = short distance and 10.8o = long distance). Data for accuracy and reaction time of the first accurate saccade were collected and analyzed. Results No difference was found between AWS and AWNS in accuracy or in reaction time. Both groups were more accurate in the prosaccade than the antisaccade trials and in the long compared to the short distance trials. Furthermore, both groups demonstrated longer saccade latencies for long compared to short distances and for antisaccade compared to prosaccade trials. Conclusions Preliminary results do not support deficits in inhibition in AWS during a motorically simple, non-speech-related oculomotor task, but additional research is warranted.

"Did I Say Cherry?" Error Patterns on a Blocked Cyclic Naming Task for Bilingual Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder.

Purpose Using a blocked cyclic picture-naming task, we compared accuracy and error patterns across languages for Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method Pictured stimuli were manipulated for semantic similarity across two (Same and Mixed) category contexts. Children's productions were scored off-line for accuracy, error frequency, and error type. Results Typically developing children were more accurate and produced fewer errors than their peers with DLD; however, this was moderated by task language and semantic context. Children were generally more accurate when naming pictures in English compared to Spanish and in the Mixed-category context compared to the Same-category context. Analyses of error types further showed that children with less English language exposure specifically produced more nonresponses in English than in Spanish. Children with DLD produced more of each error type than their typically developing peers, particularly in Spanish. Conclusions Regardless of language ability, bilingual children demonstrated greater difficulty with lexical retrieval for pictured items in the semantically related context than in the unrelated context. However, bilingual children with DLD produced more errors of all types than is typical for children developing more than one language. Their greater error rates are not secondary to limited second language exposure but instead reflect deficits inherent to the nature of language impairment. Results from this study are discussed using a framework of semantic constraint, where we propose that because bilingual children with DLD have impoverished semantic networks, and this knowledge insufficiently constrains activation for lexical selection, thereby increasing error production.

Longitudinal evidence for simultaneous bilingual language development with shifting language dominance, and how to explain it.

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their languages should depend on how much they practice each (not merely age of acquisition), and (2) using an L2 more could cause a bilingual to gradually 'unlearn' their L1. Using timed picture naming and vocabulary measures, we tracked 139 children for several years as they transitioned from mostly-Spanish homes to mostly-English schools. Following their increased English use, many became more proficient in English than Spanish around the third grade, demonstrating continual learning. But their Spanish also improved, showing that L1-attrition is not inevitable. Incremental learning explains both co-improvement and L1-attrition as consequences of experience-driven learning: improvement from continuing L1 use can offset competitive unlearning.

Cross-Linguistic Cognate Production in Spanish-English Bilingual Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., telephone in English and teléfono in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates (table/mesa). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants included Spanish-English bilingual children (aged 5;0 to 9;11 [years;months]), 25 with SLI and 92 without, who had comparable language experience. Cognate and noncognate items were taken from English and Spanish versions of the Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (Brownell, 2000, 2001). Results: Although bilingual children with language impairment named fewer items correctly overall, they accurately named cognates more often than noncognates, as did typically developing children. Independent of language ability, accurate naming of a cognate in one language strongly predicted accurate naming in the other language. Conclusion: Language impairment appears unrelated to the mechanism that produces a cognate advantage in naming accuracy. Given that correct performance for a difficult word in one language is associated with knowing its cognate in another, cognates may be particularly viable targets for language intervention in bilingual children with SLI.

Effects of Age of English Exposure, Current Input/Output, and grade on bilingual language performance.

This study evaluates the effects of Age of Exposure to English (AoEE) and Current Input/Output on language performance in a cross-sectional sample of Spanish-English bilingual children. First- (N = 586) and third-graders (N = 298) who spanned a wide range of bilingual language experience participated. Parents and teachers provided information about English and Spanish language use. Short tests of semantic and morphosyntactic development in Spanish and English were used to quantify children's knowledge of each language. There were significant interactions between AoEE and Current Input/Output for children at third grade in English and in both grades for Spanish. In English, the relationship between AoEE and language scores were linear for first- and third-graders. In Spanish a nonlinear relationship was observed. We discuss how much of the variance was accounted for by AoEE and Current Input/Output.

Parents accidentally substitute similar sounding sibling names more often than dissimilar names.

When parents select similar sounding names for their children, do they set themselves up for more speech errors in the future? Questionnaire data from 334 respondents suggest that they do. Respondents whose names shared initial or final sounds with a sibling's reported that their parents accidentally called them by the sibling's name more often than those without such name overlap. Having a sibling of the same gender, similar appearance, or similar age was also associated with more frequent name substitutions. Almost all other name substitutions by parents involved other family members and over 5% of respondents reported a parent substituting the name of a pet, which suggests a strong role for social and situational cues in retrieving personal names for direct address. To the extent that retrieval cues are shared with other people or animals, other names become available and may substitute for the intended name, particularly when names sound similar.

The effect of additional characters on choice of referring expression: Everyone counts.

Two story-telling experiments examine the process of choosing between pronouns and proper names in speaking. Such choices are traditionally attributed to speakers striving to make referring expressions maximally interpretable to addressees. The experiments revealed a novel effect: even when a pronoun would not be ambiguous, the presence of another character in the discourse decreased pronoun use and increased latencies to refer to the most prominent character in the discourse. In other words, speakers were more likely to call Minnie Minnie than shewhen Donald was also present. Even when the referent character appeared alone in the stimulus picture, the presence of another character in the preceding discourse reduced pronouns. Furthermore, pronoun use varied with features associated with the speaker's degree of focus on the preceding discourse (e.g., narrative style and disfluency). We attribute this effect to competition for attentional resources in the speaker's representation of the discourse.

Speakers gaze at objects while preparing intentionally inaccurate labels for them.

When describing scenes, speakers gaze at objects while preparing their names (Z. M. Griffin & K. Bock, 2000). In this study, the authors investigated whether gazes to referents occurred in the absence of a correspondence between visual features and word meaning. Speakers gazed significantly longer at objects before intentionally labeling them inaccurately with the names of similar things (e.g., calling a horse a dog) than when labeling them accurately. This held for grammatical subjects and objects as well as agents and patients. Moreover, the time spent gazing at a referent before labeling it with a novel word or accurate name was similar and decreased as speakers gained experience using the novel word. These results suggest that visual attention in speaking may be directed toward referents in the absence of any association between their visual forms and the words used to talk about them.

Observing the what and when of language production for different age groups by monitoring speakers' eye movements.

Research on adult age differences in language production has traditionally focused on either the production of single words or the properties of language samples. Older adults are more prone to word retrieval failures than are younger adults (e.g., ). Older adults also tend to produce fewer ideas per utterance and fewer left-branching syntactic structures (e.g., ). The use of eye movement monitoring in the study of language production allows researchers to examine word production processes in the context of multiword utterances, bridging the gap between behavior in word production studies and spontaneous speech samples. This paper outlines one view of how speakers plan and produce utterances, summarizes the literature on age-related changes in production, presents an overview of the published research on speakers' gaze during picture description, and recaps a study using eye movement monitoring to explore age-related changes in language production.

The eyes are right when the mouth is wrong.

When describing visual scenes, speakers typically gaze at objects while preparing their names. In a study of the relation between eye movements and speech, a corpus of self-corrected speech errors was analyzed. If errors result from rushed word preparation, insufficient visual information, or failure to check prepared names against objects, speakers should spend less time gazing at referents before uttering errors than before uttering correct names. Counter to predictions, gazes to referents before errors (e.g., gazes to an axe before saying "ham-" [hammer]) highly resembled gazes to referents before correct names (e.g., gazes to an axe before saying "axe"). However, speakers gazed at referents for more time after initiating erroneous compared with correct names, apparently while they prepared corrections. Assuming that gaze nonetheless reflects word preparation, errors were not associated with insufficient preparation. Nor were errors systematically associated with decreased inspection of objects. Like gesture, gaze may accurately reflect a speaker's intentions even when the accompanying speech does not.

A reversed word length effect in coordinating the preparation and articulation of words in speaking.

Speakers tend to prepare their nouns immediately before saying them, rather than preparing them further in advance. To test the limits of this last-second preparation, speakers were asked to name object pairs without pausing between names. There was not enough time to prepare the second name while articulating the first, so the speakers' delay in starting to say the first name was based on the amount of time available to prepare the second name during speech. Before speaking, they spent more time preparing a second name (e.g., carrot) when the first name was monosyllabic (e.g., wig) rather than multisyllabic (e.g., windmill). When additional words intervened between names, the length of the first name became less important and speech began earlier. Preparation differences were reflected in speech latencies, durations, and eye movements. The results suggest that speakers are sensitive to the length of prepared words and the time needed for preparing subsequent words. They can use this information to increase fluency while minimizing word buffering.

Phonological influences on lexical (mis)selection.

Speakers produce words to convey meaning, but does meaning alone determine which words they say? We report three experiments that show independent semantic and phonological influences converging to determine word selection. Speakers named pictures (e.g., of a priest) following visually presented cloze sentences that primed either semantic competitors of the target object name ("The woman went to the convent to become a..."), homophones of the competitors ("I thought that there would still be some cookies left, but there were..."), or matched unrelated control object names. Primed semantic competitors (nun) were produced instead of picture names more often than primed unrelated control object names, showing the well-documented influence of semantic similarity on lexical selection. Surprisingly, primed homophone competitors (none) also substituted for picture names more often than control object names even though they only sounded like competitors. Thus, independent semantic and phonological influences can converge to affect word selection.

Conceptual structure modulates structural priming in the production of complex sentences.

Speakers tend to reproduce syntactic structures that they have recently comprehended or produced. This structural or syntactic priming occurs despite differences in the particular conceptual or event roles expressed in prime and target sentences (Bock & Loebell, 1990). In two sentence recall studies, we used the tendency of speakers to paraphrase the finite complements of object-raising verbs as infinitive complements (e.g., "John believed that Mary was nice" as "John believed Mary to be nice") to test whether an additional conceptual role would affect priming. Prime constructions with identical constituent orders as object-raising infinitives but an additional conceptual role ("John persuaded Mary to be nice") resulted in fewer paraphrases. Contrasts with other constructions suggest that the critical difference between primes was this extra conceptual role. Thus, subtle differences in conceptual structures can affect how speakers grammatically encode message elements.

Recency effects for meaning and form in word selection.

Three experiments examined the contribution of phonological availability in selecting words as predicted by interactive activation models of word production. Homophonous words such as week and weak permitted a word's phonological form to be activated on priming trials without selection of its meaning or lemma. Recent production of a homophone failed to significantly increase production of its twin as a sentence completion. However, speakers were significantly more likely to complete a sentence with a recently read or generated unambiguous word. This increase in response probability was unaffected by word frequency. The results constrain the degree to which experience and phonological availability may affect word selection in spoken language production.