Search

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission--repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers . However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling French at the phono-orthographic level. The output of each participant was passed down to the next participant, forming diffusion chains of 10 generations per language. We hypothesized that artificial languages would become easier to learn and exhibit greater structure when they were aligned with participants' bilingual experience (i.e., English languages being easier to learn overall), or as a function of practice (i.e., languages learned second being easier to learn overall). Instead, we found that English-like languages became more structured over generations, but only when they were learned first. In contrast, French-like languages became more structured regardless of the order of learning, suggesting the presence of an asymmetric switch cost during artificial language learning. Moreover, individual differences in language usage modulated the amount of structure produced by the participants. Overall, these data suggest that bilingual experience impacts how novel languages are learned at an individual level, which can then scale up to cultural transmission of novel language at a group level.

Although several studies have focused on novel word learning and lexicalization in (presumably) monolingual speakers, less is known about how bilinguals add novel words to their mental lexicon. In this study we trained 33 English-French bilinguals on novel word-forms that were neighbors to English words with no existing neighbors. The number of novel neighbors to each English word varied, as did the cross-linguistic orthographic overlap between the English word and its French translation. We assessed episodic memory and lexicalization of the novel words before and after a consolidation period. Cross-linguistic similarity enhanced episodic memory of novel neighbors only when neighborhood density among the novel neighbors was low. We also found evidence that novel neighbors of English words with high cross-linguistic similarity became lexicalized after a consolidation period. Overall, the results suggest that similarity to preexisting lexical representations crucially impacted lexicalization of novel words by bilingual individuals.

"Standard" varieties are often perceived as morally superior compared with "nonstandard" varieties (Hill 2008). Consequently, these differences lead to ideologies that racialize "nonstandard" varieties (Rosa 2016), and increase the negative stereotypes towards "nonstandard" varieties (Giles and Watson 2013). One outlet of such stereotypes can be observed with speech intelligibility and accentedness judgements. This study examines whether seeing a White or a South Asian face impacts listeners' perception of American, British, and Indian English and to what extent listeners' social network diversity plays a role in predicting their perception of speech. Results indicated that intelligibility scores decreased and accentedness judgements increased for all varieties when speech was paired with South Asian faces. However, listeners with less racially diverse social networks had the highest accentedness judgements. Understanding how to account for the emergence and behavioral implications of different English varieties is a pressing question, and these results shed light on how English varieties are perceived. The implications will be discussed in light of language teaching, linguistic practices, and language research.

Corpus-based models of lexical strength have questioned the role of word frequency in lexical organization. Specifically, closer fits to lexical behavior data on single words have been obtained by measures of contextual diversity, which modifies frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, semantic diversity, which considers the semantic consistency of contextual word distribution, and socially-based semantic diversity, which encodes the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Adelman, Brown & Quesada, 2006; Jones, Johns, & Recchia, 2012; Johns, in press). The present work aimed at determining if diversity drives lexical organization also at the level multiword units. Normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) were predicted from contextual, semantic and socially-based diversity measures computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. Results confirmed the superiority of diversity measures over word frequency, suggesting that multiword idiomatic phrases show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words.

Prior work examining executive control during the Simon task has focused on global congruency alone and/or has primarilycontrasted bilinguals with monolinguals. This is problematic for two reasons: (1) prior trial experience on current trialperformance is unaccounted for (Grundy et al., 2017) and (2) bilinguals are not a homogeneous group. Here, we examinedthe interaction between prior and current trial congruency in the Simon Task for 65 bilingual young adults who variedcontinuously in bilingual experience. Generally, current trial congruency effects were larger when the prior trial wascongruent vs. incongruent. However, as non-L1 experience increased, this interaction diminished; the overall prior trialeffect was reduced independently of age of acquisition. Crucially, neither non-L1 experience nor age of acquisitioninfluenced current trial congruency alone. Although preliminary, these results suggest that both congruency effects andbilingual experience influence performance on a non-linguistic executive control task.

We investigated whether bilingualism affects non-verbal model-free vs. model-based reinforcement learning (RL). Thisdual-systems theory posits independent valuation systems in controlling choices and may overlap with systems of bilingualexecutive control. Forty-five bilingual adults completed a two-stage decision making task with transition and probabilityof reward dynamically varying. First, we calculated a model-based index to measure how much participants integrateenvironmental structure with reward when planning choices. Consistent with monolingual results, we found that bilingualsdisplay model-free and model-based RL to differing degrees. Next, we assessed whether individual differences in secondlanguage (L2) age of acquisition (AoA) and language entropy interact with these RL systems. Bilinguals with earlierL2 AoA and greater language entropy demonstrated model-free RL, whereas bilinguals with later L2 AoA and lowerlanguage entropy demonstrated greater sensitivity to model-based reward frequencies. This suggests an interesting linkbetween bilingual experience and how reward shapes decision-making strategies.

Eye movement research reveals how people allocate visual attention when reading, scanning the environment around them(Rayner, 2012). These cognitive processes come together when people view what sociolinguists refer to as, the linguisticlandscape, consisting of signage in the public space. Linguistic landscapes around the world are jointly determined by top-down socio-legal provisions, and bottom-up capacities and attitudes of individual people (Leimgruber, Vingron, & Titone,2019). In a preliminary study, we found that bilinguals differed in how they viewed naturally occurring linguistic landscapeimages (Vingron et al., 2018). We are currently analyzing data from a follow-up study that investigated whether individualdifferences in language experience among bilinguals modulate their eye movements to artificial linguistic landscape imagesthat systematically manipulate text language, position, and size, while controlling for linguistic content.

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002), cross-language activation should influence which meanings are accessed and in which order. Here, we monitored the eye movements of 48 French-English and 40 English-French bilingual adults as they read within-language homonyms embedded in more or less semantically constraining English sentences. The within-language homonyms were either "cognate homonyms," whose subordinate meanings were also French cognates (e.g., "sage," "herb" or, less frequently, "wise man" in English and, also, "wise man" in French), or uniquely English (e.g., "chest"). French-English bilinguals processed cognate homonyms with subordinate meanings more quickly than uniquely English homonyms with subordinate meanings, and individual differences in executive control capacity modulated their processing of uniquely English homonyms only. In contrast, English-French bilinguals processed all within-language homonyms similarly, regardless of cognate status and executive control capacity. Our findings suggest that cross-language activation impacts within-language ambiguity resolution by changing the relative dominance of the meanings associated with a word form, and that cross-language activation varies as a function of the language tested (first or second language).

Upon hearing someone's speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker's age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners' accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners' ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners' accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

We investigated whether cross-language activation is sensitive to shifting language demands and language experience during first and second language (i.e., L1, L2) reading. Experiment 1 consisted of L1 French-L2 English bilinguals reading in the L2, and Experiment 2 consisted of L1 English-L2 French bilinguals reading in the L1. Both groups read English sentences with target words serving as indices of cross-language activation: cross-language homographs, cognates, and matched language-unique control words. Critically, we manipulated whether English sentences contained a momentary language switch into French before downstream target words. This allowed us to assess the consequences of shifting language demands, both in the moment, and residually following a switch as a function of language experience. Switches into French were associated with a reading cost at the switch site for both L2 and L1 readers. However, downstream cross-language activation was larger following a switch only for L1 readers. These results suggest that cross-language activation is jointly sensitive to momentary shifts in language demands and language experience, likely reflecting different control demands faced by L2 versus L1 readers, consistent with models of bilingual processing that ascribe a primary role for language control.

Purpose: People are shaped holistically by dynamic and interrelated individual and social-ecological systems. This perspective has been discussed in the context of varied aspects of bilingual experiences, namely language acquisition and development. Here, we applied a Systems Framework of Bilingualism to language attitudes, which may be especially responsive to social-ecological influences. Methodology: One hundred twenty-three French–English bilingual adults (M age = 21.20, SD = 3.21) completed self-report questionnaires on demographic information and their attitudes toward languages. A subset of these bilinguals (n = 73) completed a social network survey. Data and analysis: We used language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis to examine the role of individual characteristics (i.e., first language), interpersonal language dynamics (i.e., person-to-person interactions), and ecological language dynamics (i.e., neighborhood language exposure). Findings and Conclusions: At an individual level, we found that bilinguals' language background (i.e., first language) predicted attitudes of solidarity toward a language (i.e., whether a language is associated with personal identity and belongingness). When considering sociolinguistic layers of influence, we found that bilinguals' social network and neighborhood-level language exposure jointly predicted their attitudes of solidarity toward a language, as well as their attitudes toward the protection of minority languages. Originality: While most studies have examined language experience in a unidimensional nature, the present study investigated multilingual language attitudes by considering multiple systems within a social-ecological framework. Implications: Taken together, the results suggest that several interrelated interpersonal and ecological systems are associated with language attitudes, which could have important implications for planning future language policies in multilingual societies such as Montréal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye movement measures demonstrate differences in first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph-level reading as a function of individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals (Whitford & Titone, 2012). Specifically, as current L2 exposure increases, the ease of L2 word processing increases, but the ease of L1 word processing decreases. Here, we investigate whether current L2 exposure also relates to more general aspects of reading performance, including global eye movement measures and how bilinguals use parafoveal information to the right of fixation during L1 and L2 sentence-level reading, through use of a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm (McConkie & Rayner, 1975). We found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure exhibited increased L2 reading fluency (faster reading rates, shorter forward fixation durations), but decreased L1 reading fluency (slower reading rates, longer forward fixation durations). We also found that bilinguals with high versus low current L2 exposure were more affected by reductions in window size during L2 reading (indicative of a larger L2 perceptual span), but were less affected by reductions in window size during L1 reading (indicative of a smaller L1 perceptual span). Taken together, these findings suggest that individual differences in current L2 exposure among bilinguals also modulate more general aspects of reading behavior, including global measures of reading difficulty and the allocation of visual attention into the parafovea during both L1 and L2 sentence-level reading.

Models of bilingual reading such as Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) do not predict a central role for domain-general executive control during bilingual reading, in contrast with bilingual models from other domains, such as production (e.g., the Inhibitory Control Model; Green, 1998). We thus investigated whether individual differences among bilinguals in domain-general executive control modulate cross-language activation during L2 sentence reading, over and above other factors such as L2 proficiency. Fifty French-English bilinguals read L2-English sentences while their eye movements were recorded, and they subsequently completed a battery of executive control and L2 proficiency tasks. High- and low-constraint sentences contained interlingual homographs ("chat" = "casual conversation" in English, "a cat" in French), cognates ("piano" in English and French), or L2-specific control words. The results showed that greater executive control among bilinguals but not L2 proficiency reduced cross-language activation in terms of interlingual homograph interference. In contrast, increased L2 proficiency but not executive control reduced cross-language activation in terms of cognate facilitation. These results suggest that models of bilingual reading must incorporate mechanisms by which domain-general executive control can alter the earliest stages of bilingual lexical activation.