Psycholinguistics

Recent studies have suggested that bilingualism may provide an advantage to
older adults on inhibitory control and have a positive effect on some cognitive
declines seen in normal aging. This study examined the effects of bilingualism on
inhibitory control using a Simon task and a Stroop task on a heterogeneous sample of
bilinguals whose level of proficiency on each of their two languages varied widely.
Comparison of performances between younger and older monolingual and bilingual
participants revealed a bilingual advantage on the Simon task. Results support the
view that bilingualism increases skills that are associated with selective attention.
Additionally, older bilingual adults performed as well as younger bilingual adults
suggesting they are not experiencing the age-related declines in the efficiency of
inhibitory processes observed in the older monolingual adults. However, a bilingual
advantage was not observed on the Stroop task indicating that the advantage may
depend on the nature of the distracting stimulus. Bilinguals may be better equipped
than monolinguals at inhibiting misleading spatial information but not at inhibiting misleading linguistic information. The performance of balanced and non-balanced
bilinguals was similar under both Simon and Stroop tasks suggesting that language
level proficiency does not play a role in providing an advantage.

Previous research has demonstrated that sensitivity to unimodal nonnative speech
contrasts generally narrows during the first year. Although other work has demonstrated
a processing advantage for multimodal stimuli, research on infants' responsiveness to
nonnative contrasts so far has not examined whether concurrent auditory and visual
speech information can modulate perceptual narrowing. Thus, the current study
investigated the influence ofbimodally specified speech sounds on infants' sensitivity to
a nonnative phonemic contrast. Six-month-old and 10- to 12-month-old infants were
tested in a habituation/test procedure for discrimination of an audiovisual nonnative
speech contrast (Hindi /tal dental vs. /Tal retroflex stop). Findings showed that infants at
both ages exhibited evidence of discrimination following habituation to one of the speech
sounds. These findings suggest that the usually observed decline in responsiveness to
nonnative speech contrasts is limited to audibly specified contrasts and that concurrent
visual speech information enhances the discriminability of such contrasts.

This dissertation explores the perspectives of culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners on school conditions that enable them to share their heritage languages and cultures, as well as the ways that these learners propose that their heritage languages and cultures could be more recognized in an English-only middle school setting. This study focused specifically on the role that culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners perceived that they played in the process of their own social empowerment, a role that could be achieved through the development of their voices by becoming critically involved in creating spaces for their heritage languages and cultures in English-only settings. In this study, student voice is the means for the culturally and linguistically diverse and English learners' voices to emerge: the voices that are frequently oppressed because of the lack of power. This framework provides guidance to integrate the excluded learners' voices in a school milieu that habitually muffles these voices. Listening to the bicultural and bilingual voices is important but not sufficient to challenge the power structure of U.S. schools. In this study, culturally and linguistically diverse learners and English learners conceptualized ways that their heritage languages and cultures could be (more) recognized in their school settings. The voices of the students are important; they should be respected and valued. Hearing the students in this study reminds us and validates the assertion that students from diverse languages and cultures are not monolith. They have different and unique experiences and this study gave voice to some of those. Leaders from state level, district level, and school level could open the doors for students to share their experiences in the schools; in the case of this study, to learn from these students what a school milieu that authentically recognizes their cultures and languages is.

Bilinguals commonly report experiencing emotions differently depending on which language are they speaking. Emotionally loaded words were expected to be appraised differently in first versus second language in a sample of Spanish-English bilinguals (n=117). English (L2) ratings were subtracted from Spanish (L1) ratings; the resulted scores were used as dependent variable in the analyses. Three categories of words (positive, negative and taboo) were appraised in both languages (English and Spanish)and two sensory modalities (Visual and auditory). The differences in valence scores in Spanish (L1) and English (L2) were expected to be significantly higher when presented aurally than when presented visually. Additionally, taboo words were expected to yield larger differential scores than negative and positive words. The 2 X 3 general linear model (GLM) revealed no significant effect of sensory modality but a significant effect of word type. Additional analyses of the influence of language and sensory modality within each word category resulted in significant differences in ratings between languages. Positive word ratings were higher (more positive) in English than in Spanish.

This experiment investigated the role of sentence meaning in auditory language comprehension. Tokens from a GOAT-COAT speech voicing continuum were embedded in carrier sentences that were biased toward either a "goat" or "coat" interpretation and presented to subjects for a word identification task. The identification function showed a boundary shift in favor of the biased context, and an interaction localized to the ambiguous boundary region. Response times were largest in the boundary region and the interaction between the two factors was localized to the boundary region and the voiced endpoint. There was also a response time advantage for context consistent responses specifically in the boundary region. These results and those of earlier research (Connine, 1987; Connine & Clifton, 1987) are described in terms of interactive activation of potential response categories by acoustic parameter and sentence context.

The aim of this project was to clarify the findings of Shapiro and Levine (1990) by exploring post-verb argument structure complexity effects. Three verb types, transitives, datives and obligatory three-place, were probed at four positions during an on-line sentence processing task that utilized cross-modal naming as the secondary task in a reaction time paradigm. No significant verb x probe interaction was found at any probe position with any of the three verb types. Two possible explanations are given for this pattern of results: (1) the choice of cross-modal naming as the secondary task; and, (2) the high variability of reaction times among subjects.

A probe recognition task tested memory for syntactic (active/passive arid
word order) changes and for semantic (meaningful and anomalous) changes.
On the basis of McNeill's theory of semantic development the following
predictions were made: (a) with a minimal retention interval (almost
immediate) 8-year-olds would recognize semantic changes better than
syntactic changes, while 6-year-olds would not perform differently on
the two types of changes, (b) with a longer retention interval, 8-year-olds
would recognize semantic changes better than syntactic changes. Results
supported (b) but in (a) the 8-year-olds recognized syntactic changes
better. This finding was discussed in terms of task differences and a new
experimental approach was proposed.

This study investigated the interaction of acoustic and semantic information for phoneme categorization during sentence comprehension. Voice onset time (VOT) was manipulated to form a goat-to-coat voicing continuum; target stimuli from this continuum were embedded in sentences biased toward `goat' or `coat'. Sentences were presented in conjunction with three distinct experimental tasks and several temporal positions. Experiment 1A used a cross-modal identification task (Borsky, Tuller, and Shapiro, 1998) to cue stimulus identification at the target; the results showed sentence context biases on identifications and sentence context congruency effects on response times for mid-range stimuli. Experiment 1B used a cross-modal identification task 450 ms after the target; results showed sentence biases on identifications that extended to the endpoints and no sentence context congruency effects on response times. Experiment 2 used a cross-modal interference task (CMI) with the same auditory stimuli. The primary task was listening to the sentences for comprehension; the interference task was a word/non-word decision to an unrelated visual probe that appeared at one of three temporal positions. This was the only task for which no explicit judgments about the identity of the target were required. Response times at the embedded target showed a significant effect of VOT only. The 450 ms later probe position showed a significant VOT x Context interaction; response times were significantly longer for endpoint stimuli when sentence meaning was biased toward the opposite endpoint. These results were interpreted as initially context-independent phonological processing followed by context integration. Experiment 3 used a word-monitoring task; subjects saw the word `goat' or `coat' briefly on a computer screen, then listened to the same sentence stimuli used for the other experiments. The task was to press a button as soon as the monitoring target was heard in the sentence. Results showed that sentence context did not bias identifications. However, response times were significantly longer when sentence context was incongruent with the monitoring target. Taken together, the results of the three distinct tasks support an account of phonological processing in which phoneme categorization is initially independent unless an explicit judgment about the identity of the target is required.

Activation of the representations of the two languages in bilingual memory has been shown to affect recognition during initial word comprehension (e.g., Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002). This study investigated whether the activation of semantic (i.e., meaning) and lexical (i.e., form) representations of words in a bilingual's two languages affects word recognition after the first stages of word comprehension. False recognition of words in one language that were similar in meaning and/or form to words studied in the other language was an indication of these effects. This study further investigated whether false recognition based on meaning and/or form is modulated by bilingual language proficiency.

This study examines gaze patterns of monolinguals and bilinguals encoding speech in familiar and unfamiliar languages. In condition 1 English monolinguals viewed videos in familiar and unfamiliar languages (English and Spanish or Icelandic). They performed a task to ensure encoding: on each trial, two videos of short sentences were presented, followed by an audio-only recording of one of those sentences. Participants choose whether the audio-clip matched the first or second video. Participants gazed significantly longer at speaker's mouths when viewing unfamiliar languages. In condition 2 Spanish-English bilingual's viewed English and Spanish, no difference was found between the languages. In condition 3 the task was removed, English monolinguals viewed 20 English and 20 Icelandic videos, no difference in the gaze patterns was found, suggesting this phenomenon relies on encoding. Results indicate people encoding unfamiliar speech attend to the mouth presumably to extract more accurate audiovisually invariant and highly salient speech information.