Operating in a second language lowers cognitive interference during creative idea generation: Evidence from brain oscillations in bilinguals.

Tasks measuring human creativity overwhelmingly rely on both language comprehension and production. Although most of the world's population is bilingual, few studies have investigated the effects of language of operation on creative output. This is surprising given that fluent bilinguals master inhibitory control, a mechanism also at play in creative idea evaluation. Here, we compared creative output in the two languages of Polish(L1)-English(L2) bilinguals engaged in a cyclic adaptation of the Alternative Uses Task increasing the contribution of idea evaluation (convergent thinking). We show that Polish-English bilinguals suffer less cognitive interference when generating unusual uses for common objects in the L2 than the L1, without incurring a significant drop in idea originality. Right posterior alpha oscillation power, known to reflect creative thinking, increased over cycles. This effect paralleled the increase in originality ratings over cycles, and lower alpha power (8-10 Hz) was significantly greater in the L1 than the L2. Unexpectedly, we found greater beta (16.5-28 Hz) desynchronization in the L2 than the L1, suggesting that bilingual participants suffered less interference from competing mental representations when performing the task in the L2. Whereas creative output seems unaffected by language of operation overall, the drop in beta power in the L2 suggests that bilinguals are not subjected to the same level of semantic flooding in the second language as they naturally experience in their native language.

Brain potentials reveal how emotion filters native language access when bilinguals read words in their second language.

It is now well established that reading words in a second language (L2) automatically activates native language (L1) translations in bilinguals. Although there is evidence that access to such representations is inhibited when words have a negative emotional valence, the mechanism underlying such inhibition is elusive, and it is unknown whether inhibition arises online as L2 is being processed or whether negative valence affects subsequent L1 processing. Here, we recorded event-related brain potentials in Chinese-English bilinguals engaged in an implicit translation-priming paradigm involving L2 (English) word pairs. Participants performed a semantic relatedness task, unaware that word pairs could conceal a sound repetition if translated into Chinese. When emotional valence was manipulated in prime position (first word), we observed form repetition priming through L1 translations for positive but not for negative words. However, when emotional valence was manipulated in target position (second word), priming occurred for both positive and negative word valences. This result begins to elucidate the mechanism by which emotion regulates language processing in bilinguals: Negative words in L2 induce a refractory period during which cross-language lexical access is blocked. These findings show that despite being neuroanatomically distinct in the human brain, emotional (limbic) regulation systems can penetrate language processing.

Time flows vertically in Chinese.

Speakers of Mandarin Chinese are thought to conceptualise time along the vertical axis-as evidence for metaphor embodiment-but the extant behavioural evidence remains unclear. Here, we used electrophysiology to test space-time conceptual relationships implicitly in native speakers of Chinese. We employed a modified arrow flanker task, in which the central arrow in a set of three was replaced by a spatial word (e.g., -'up'), a spatiotemporal metaphor (e. g., -'last month', literally 'up month') or a non-spatial temporal expression (e.g., -'last year', literally 'gone year'). N400 modulations of event-related brain potentials served to measure the level of perceived congruency between semantic word content and arrow direction. Critically, we tested whether N400 modulations expected for spatial words and spatial temporal metaphors would generalise to non-spatial temporal expressions. In addition to the predicted N400 effects, we found a congruency effect of a similar magnitude for non-spatial temporal metaphors. On the basis of direct brain measurements indexing semantic processing, and in the absence of contrastive behavioural patterns, we demonstrate that native speakers of Chinese conceptualise time along the vertical axis, and thus have embodied spatiotemporal metaphors.

Irreversible specialization for speech perception in early international adoptees.

In early childhood, the human brain goes through a period of tuning to native speech sounds but retains remarkable flexibility, allowing the learning of new languages throughout life. However, little is known about the stability over time of early neural specialization for speech and its influence on the formation of novel language representations. Here, we provide evidence that early international adoptees, who lose contact with their native language environment after adoption, retain enhanced sensitivity to a native lexical tone contrast more than 15 years after being adopted to Sweden from China, in the absence of any pretest familiarization with the stimuli. Changes in oscillatory brain activity showed how adoptees resort to inhibiting the processing of defunct phonological representations, rather than forgetting or replacing them with new ones. Furthermore, neurophysiological responses to native and nonnative contrasts were not negatively correlated, suggesting that native language retention does not interfere with the acquisition of adoptive phonology acquisition. These results suggest that early language experience provides strikingly resilient specialization for speech which is compensated for through inhibitory control mechanisms as learning conditions change later in life.

Inhibitory control training reveals a common neurofunctional basis for generic executive functions and language switching in bilinguals.

BACKGROUND: The neural networks underpinning language control and domain-general executive functions overlap in bilinguals, but existing evidence is mainly correlative. Here, we present the first neurofunctional evidence for a transfer effect between (domain-general) inhibitory control and language control through training. We trained Chinese-English bilinguals for 8 days using a Simon task taxing the inhibitory control system, whilst an active control group was trained with a color judgment task that does not tax the inhibitory control system. All participants performed a language-switching task before and after training. It has been suggested that the activity of the left DLPFC was associated with domain-general top-down cognitive control (Macdonald et al. Science 288: 1835-1838, 2000) and bilingual language control (Wang et al. Neuroimage 35: 862-870, 2007). In addition, the dACC was closely related to the conflict detection (Abutalebi et al. Cereb Cortex 18:1496-1505, 2008). Last, the activity of the left caudate has been linked with lexical selection (Abutalebi et al. Cereb Cortex 18:1496-1505, 2008), especially the selection of the weak language (Abutalebi et al. Cortex 49: 905-911, 2013). Therefore, we focused on these three regions of interest (ROIs) where neural changes associated with transfer were expected to occur. RESULTS: The results showed a negative correlation between changes in activation levels in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and changes in the switch cost magnitude in the language-switching task in the training group but not in the control group, suggesting that the DLPFC plays a critical role in the transfer effect from domain-general executive functions to language control. However, there was no measurable effect in the anterior cingulate cortex or left caudate nucleus, suggesting that the inhibitory control training increased the neural efficiency for language production in bilinguals in terms of attention shifting and conflict resolution, but the training did not affect conflict detection and lexical selection. CONCLUSION: These findings showed how cognitive training evidence can help establish a causational link between the neural basis of domain-general executive functions and language control in bilinguals.

Towards Optimization of Hydroxychloroquine Dosing in Intensive Care Unit COVID-19 Patients.

Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) appears to be a promising treatment for COVID-19. However, all ongoing clinical trials with HCQ use different dosing regimens, resulting in various concentrations. Pharmacokinetic studies are therefore needed to define the optimal dosing regimen.

Back to the future? How Chinese-English bilinguals switch between front and back orientation for time.

The ability to conceive time is a corner stone of human cognition. It is unknown, however, whether time conceptualisation differs depending on language of operation in bilinguals. Whilst both Chinese and English cultures associate the future with the front space, some temporal expressions of Chinese involve a configuration reversal due to historic reasons. For instance, Chinese refers to the day after tomorrow using the spatiotemporal metaphor hou-tian - 'back-day' and to the day before yesterday using qian-tian - 'front-day'. Here, we show that native metaphors interfere with time conceptualisation when bilinguals operate in the second language. We asked Chinese-English bilinguals to indicate whether an auditory stimulus depicted a day of the week either one or two days away from the present day, irrespective of whether it referred to the past or the future, and ignoring whether it was presented through loudspeakers situated in the back or the front space. Stimulus configurations incongruent with spatiotemporal metaphors of Chinese (e.g., "Friday" presented in the front of the participant during a session held on a Wednesday) were conceptually more challenging than congruent configurations (e.g., the same stimulus presented in their back), as indexed by N400 modulations of event-related brain potentials. The same pattern obtained for days or years as stimuli, but surprisingly, it was found only when participants operated in English, not in Chinese. We contend that the task was easier and less prone to induce cross-language activation when conducted in the native language. We thus show that, when they operate in the second language, bilinguals unconsciously retrieve irrelevant native language representations that shape time conceptualisation in real time.

Social feedback interferes with implicit rule learning: Evidence from event-related brain potentials.

The human brain can learn contingencies built into stimulus sequences unconsciously. The quality of such implicit learning has been connected to stimulus social relevance, but results so far are inconsistent. We engaged participants in an implicit-intentional learning task in which they learned to discriminate between legal and illegal card triads on the sole basis of feedback provided within a staircase procedure. Half of the participants received feedback from pictures of faces with a happy or sad expression (social group) and the other half based on traffic light icons (symbolic group). We hypothesised that feedback from faces would have a greater impact on learning than that from traffic lights. Although performance during learning did not differ between groups, the feedback error-related negativity (fERN) was delayed by ~20 ms for social relative to symbolic feedback, and the P3b modulation elicited by infrequent legal card triads within a stream of illegal ones during the test phase was significantly larger in the symbolic than the social feedback group. Furthermore, the P3b mean amplitude recorded at test negatively correlated with the latency of the fERN recorded during learning. These results counterintuitively suggest that, relative to symbolic feedback, socially salient feedback interferes with implicit learning.

Facilitation of Fast Backward Priming After Left Cerebellar Continuous Theta-Burst Stimulation.

Traditional theories of backward priming account only for the priming effects found at long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Here, we suggest that the presence of backward priming at short SOAs may be related to the integrative role of the cerebellum. Previous research has shown that the right cerebellum is involved in forward associative priming. Functional magnetic resonance imaging reveals some activation of the left cerebellar hemisphere during backward priming; but what this activation represents is unclear. Here we explore this issue using continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) and associative priming in a lexical decision task. We tested the hypothesis that the left cerebellum plays a role in backward priming and that this is dissociated from the role of the right cerebellum in forward priming. Before and after cTBS was applied to their left and right cerebellar hemispheres, participants completed a lexical decision task. Although we did not replicate the forward priming effect reported in the literature, we did find a significant increase in backward priming after left relative to right cerebellar cTBS. We consider how theories of cerebellar function in the motor domain can be extended to language and cognitive models of backward priming.

Effects of school-based mindfulness training on emotion processing and well-being in adolescents: evidence from event-related potentials.

In a non-randomized controlled study, we investigated the efficacy of a school-based mindfulness curriculum delivered by schoolteachers to older secondary school students (16-18 years). We measured changes in emotion processing indexed by P3b event-related potential (ERP) modulations in an affective oddball task using static human faces. ERPs were recorded to happy and sad face oddballs presented in a stimulus stream of frequent faces with neutral expression, before and after 8 weeks of mindfulness training. Whilst the mean amplitude of the P3b, an ERP component typically elicited by infrequent oddballs, decreased between testing sessions in the control group, it remained unchanged in the training group. Significant increases in self-reported well-being and fewer doctor visits for mental health support were also reported in the training group as compared to controls. The observed habituation to emotional stimuli in controls thus contrasted with maintained sensitivity in mindfulness-trained students. These results suggest that in-school mindfulness training for adolescents has scope for increasing awareness of socially relevant emotional stimuli, irrespective of valence, and thus may decrease vulnerability to depression.

Second language feedback abolishes the "hot hand" effect during even-probability gambling.

Research into language-emotion interactions has revealed intriguing cognitive inhibition effects by emotionally negative words in bilinguals. Here, we turn to the domain of human risk taking and show that the experience of positive recency in games of chance-the "hot hand" effect-is diminished when game outcomes are provided in a second language rather than the native language. We engaged late Chinese-English bilinguals with "play" or "leave" decisions upon presentation of equal-odds bets while manipulating language of feedback and outcome value. When positive game outcomes were presented in their second language, English, participants subsequently took significantly fewer gambles and responded slower compared with the trials in which equivalent feedback was provided in Chinese, their native language. Positive feedback was identified as driving the cross-language difference in preference for risk over certainty: feedback for previous winning outcomes presented in Chinese increased subsequent risk taking, whereas in the English context no such effect was observed. Complementing this behavioral effect, event-related brain potentials elicited by feedback words showed an amplified response to Chinese relative to English in the feedback-related negativity window, indicating a stronger impact in the native than in the second language. We also observed a main effect of language on P300 amplitude and found it correlated with the cross-language difference in risk selections, suggesting that the greater the difference in attention between languages, the greater the difference in risk-taking behavior. These results provide evidence that the hot hand effect is at least attenuated when an individual operates in a non-native language.

The bilingual brain turns a blind eye to negative statements in the second language.

Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. Here we investigated semantic integration of affectively salient stimuli in sentential context in the first- and second-language (L2) of late fluent Polish-English bilinguals living in the UK. The 19 participants indicated whether Polish and English sentences ending with a semantically and affectively congruent or incongruent adjective of controlled affective valence made sense while undergoing behavioral and electrophysiological recordings. We focused on the N400, a wave of event-related potentials known to index semantic integration. We expected N400 amplitude to index increased processing demands in L2 English comprehension and potential language-valence interactions to reveal differences in affective processing between languages. Contrary to our initial expectation, we found increased N400 for sentences in L1 Polish, possibly driven by greater affective salience of sentences in the native language. Critically, language interacted with affective valence, such that N400 amplitudes were reduced for English sentences ending in a negative fashion as compared to all other conditions. We interpreted this as a sign that bilinguals suppress L2 content embedded in naturalistic L2 sentences when it has negative valence, thus extending the findings of previous research on single words in clinical and linguistic research.

Anomalous transfer of syntax between languages.

Each human language possesses a set of distinctive syntactic rules. Here, we show that balanced Welsh-English bilinguals reading in English unconsciously apply a morphosyntactic rule that only exists in Welsh. The Welsh soft mutation rule determines whether the initial consonant of a noun changes based on the grammatical context (e.g., the feminine noun cath--"cat" mutates into gath in the phrase y gath--"the cat"). Using event-related brain potentials, we establish that English nouns artificially mutated according to the Welsh mutation rule (e.g., "goncert" instead of "concert") require significantly less processing effort than the same nouns implicitly violating Welsh syntax. Crucially, this effect is found whether or not the mutation affects the same initial consonant in English and Welsh, showing that Welsh syntax is applied to English regardless of phonological overlap between the two languages. Overall, these results demonstrate for the first time that abstract syntactic rules transfer anomalously from one language to the other, even when such rules exist only in one language.

Two languages, two minds: flexible cognitive processing driven by language of operation.

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Fast modulation of executive function by language context in bilinguals.

Mastering two languages has been associated with enhancement in human executive control, but previous studies of this phenomenon have exclusively relied on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual individuals. In the present study, we tested a single group of Welsh-English bilinguals engaged in a nonverbal conflict resolution task and manipulated language context by intermittently presenting words in Welsh, English, or both languages. Surprisingly, participants showed enhanced executive capacity to resolve interference when exposed to a mixed compared with a single language context, even though they ignored the irrelevant contextual words. This result was supported by greater response accuracy and reduced amplitude of the P300, an electrophysiological correlate of cognitive interference. Our findings introduce a new level of plasticity in bilingual executive control dependent on fast changing language context rather than long-term language experience.

Controlling stimulus ambiguity reduces spurious creative ideation variance in a cyclic adaptation of the alternative uses task.

In the alternative uses task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2-3 min timeframe. While idea evaluation is likely involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation. Here, we test the value of presenting a word overlapping an image compared to a word only prompt, and we introduce a cyclic adaptation of the AUT explicitly calling on participants to choose their best idea. In Experiment 1, as compared to word only, word + image prompts increased idea fluency but reduced idea originality and variability within a group of native Polish speakers. Thus, word + image prompts improve AUT baselining. In Experiment 2, different participants produced as many ideas as possible within two minutes (List) or their single best idea at the end of each of three 30 s ideation cycles (Cycle). Although originality did not differ between List and Cycle overall, the first three ideas in List were rated as less creative than the ideas in Cycle. Overall, we conclude that using disambiguating images reduces spurious interindividual variability in the AUT while introducing idea evaluation in the task allows us to assess creativity beyond idea generation.

How reading in a second language protects your heart.

Reading words in a second language spontaneously activates native language translations in the human bilingual mind. Here, we show that the emotional valence of a word presented in English constrains unconscious access to its Chinese translation. We asked native speakers of Chinese fluent with English to indicate whether or not pairs of English words were related in meaning while monitoring their brain electrical activity. Unbeknownst to the participants, some of the word pairs hid a sound repetition if translated into Chinese. Remarkably, English words with a negative valence such as "violence" did not automatically activate their Chinese translation, even though we observed the expected sound repetition priming effect for positive and neutral words, such as "holiday" and "theory." These findings show that emotion conveyed by words determines language activation in bilinguals, where potentially disturbing stimuli trigger inhibitory mechanisms that block access to the native language.

Seeing objects through the language glass.

Recent streams of research support the Whorfian hypothesis according to which language affects one's perception of the world. However, studies of object categorization in different languages have heavily relied on behavioral measures that are fuzzy and inconsistent. Here, we provide the first electrophysiological evidence for unconscious effects of language terminology on object perception. Whereas English has two words for cup and mug, Spanish labels those two objects with the word "taza." We tested native speakers of Spanish and English in an object detection task using a visual oddball paradigm, while measuring event-related brain potentials. The early deviant-related negativity elicited by deviant stimuli was greater in English than in Spanish participants. This effect, which relates to the existence of two labels in English versus one in Spanish, substantiates the neurophysiological evidence that language-specific terminology affects object categorization.

Brain potentials dissociate emotional and conceptual cross-modal priming of environmental sounds.

The attentional effects triggered by emotional stimuli in humans have been substantially investigated, but little is known about the impact of affective valence on the processing of meaning. Here, we used a cross-modal priming paradigm involving visually presented adjective-noun dyads and environmental sounds of controlled affective valence to test the contributions of conceptual relatedness and emotional congruence to priming. Participants undergoing event-related potential recording indicated whether target environmental sounds were related in meaning to adjective-noun dyads presented as primes. We tested spontaneous emotional priming by manipulating the congruence between the affective valence of the adjective in the prime and that of the sound. While the N400 was significantly reduced in amplitude by both conceptual relatedness and emotional congruence, there was no interaction between the 2 factors. The same pattern of results was found when participants judged the emotional congruence between environmental sounds and adjective-noun dyads. These results support the hypothesis that conceptual and emotional processes are functionally independent regardless of the specific cognitive focus of the comprehender.

Unconscious translation during incidental foreign language processing.

It is generally accepted that word processing in bilinguals is language nonselective. However, this has mostly been shown in contexts involving deliberate processing focusing on a particular aspect of linguistic information (e.g., lexicality, semantic category, relatedness). It is therefore unknown to what extent non-target language access is only apparent in overt language processing contexts. Here, we examined the effect of involuntary word processing in bilingual individuals performing a nonverbal judgment task on shapes. Chinese-English bilinguals had to differentiate between circles and squares by pressing buttons while ignoring intervening English words. In the critical trials, the to-be-ignored words concealed a sound repetition with the words "circle" or "square" when translated into Chinese. In these trials, we found increased N200 event-related potential amplitudes, reflecting inhibition in this condition as compared to the control condition, in which the intervening words were totally unrelated to the shapes. Since no lateralised readiness potential effect was found in this comparison, access to Chinese translations must have been quickly inhibited, consistent with the fact that we observed no behavioural effects of the hidden manipulation. These results suggest fast and unconscious language nonselective access even when no language task is being performed.