The Effect of Language Dominance on Classic Semantic, Action, Emotional, and Phonemic Fluency in Unbalanced Bilinguals.

OBJECTIVE: Verbal fluency evaluation in bilingual speakers should include dual-language assessment to obtain a comprehensive profile of word retrieval abilities. This study is the first to compare classic semantic, action, emotional, and phonemic fluency in terms of the magnitude of their performance gaps between the dominant and nondominant language in unbalanced bilingual speakers. We also examined the quantitative relationship between language dominance and verbal fluency performance. METHOD: Twenty-six bilingual adults completed a comprehensive set of classic semantic ("animals," "vegetables"), action ("do"), emotional ("happy," "sad," "afraid"), and phonemic ("F," "A," "S") fluency tasks in their dominant language (English) and nondominant language (Spanish) in two sessions on separate days. Participants also completed subjective and objective measures of language proficiency. RESULTS: All tasks yielded fewer correct responses in the nondominant language. The between-languages performance gap was the largest for "animals" and the smallest for emotional fluency. "Happy" yielded the most balanced performance among all semantic tasks and a positivity bias that was unaffected by language dominance. Finally, language dominance scores computed by a newly developed formula indicated relationships between self-rated proficiency and fluency performance. CONCLUSIONS: This study provides preliminary, normative data of classic semantic, action, emotional, and phonemic fluency that could be used to gauge unbalanced bilingual speakers' performance. Significant impacts of language dominance on "animals" demand caution in using this widely used classic semantic category in evaluating bilingual speakers' performance. The data also underscore the robustness of positivity biases in emotional fluency and the validity of using subjective measures to supplement neuropsychological assessment of fluency performance.

Neural Mechanisms of the Acceptable Noise Level.

PURPOSE: The present brain-behavior study examined whether sensory registration or neural inhibition processes explained variability in the behavioral most comfortable level (MCL) and background noise level (BNL) components of the acceptable noise level (ANL) measure. METHOD: A traditional auditory gating paradigm was used to evoke neural responses to pairs of pure-tone stimuli in 32 adult listeners with normal hearing. Relationships between behavioral ANL, MCL, and BNL components and cortical responses to each of the paired stimuli were analyzed using linear mixed-effects regression analyses. RESULTS: Neural responses elicited by Stimulus 2 in the gating paradigm significantly predicted the computed ANL response. The MCL component was significantly associated with responses elicited by Stimulus 1 of the pair. The BNL component of the ANL was significantly associated with neural responses to both Stimulus 1 and Stimulus 2. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest neural processes related to neural inhibition support the ANL and BNL component while neural stimulus registration properties are associated with the MCL a listener chooses. These findings suggest that differential neural mechanisms underlie the separate MCL and BNL components of the ANL response.

Dual-Language Testing of Emotional Verbal Fluency: A Closer Look at "Joy," "Sadness," "Fear," "Anger," and "Disgust".

OBJECTIVE: Assessing neuropsychological functions of dual-language speakers with semantic verbal fluency should consider the impact of language proficiency. Much evidence for the proficiency effect is found in tasks targeting neutral words. The proficiency effect on emotional verbal fluency (Emo-VF) that targets emotional word retrieval, however, is far from conclusive. This study aimed to clarify the proficiency effect on Emo-VF, specifically the extent to which language proficiency impacted positive and negative word retrieval comparably. In addition, the study examined the extent to which dual-languages speakers produced duplicated items and unique, non-duplicated items in each of two languages tested. METHOD: Thirty-two adult participants completed Emo-VF tasks that targeted a comprehensive set of basic emotions ("joy," "sadness," "fear," "anger," "disgust") in English and Spanish in two sessions separated by at least 72 h. All participants exhibited greater proficiency in English than in Spanish according to subjective and objective measures of language proficiency. RESULTS: Verbal productivity was comparably lowered for all emotions in the less proficient language. Differences among categories were consistent between languages, with "joy" eliciting more words than other emotions, and "fear" yielding the highest productivity among negative emotions. Finally, dual-language speakers produced a significant number of unique items in different languages, especially for "fear." CONCLUSION: Language proficiency exerts a general effect on positive and negative word retrieval. The study extends previous work by revealing differences between "fear" and other negative categories in addition to replicating positivity biases in unbalanced dual-language speakers. Dual-language testing is valuable in capturing the richness of emotional word repertoire associated with different languages.

Factors Predicting Mental Effort Associated With Verbal Fluency: Cue Types, Switching, and Fear of Negative Evaluation.

PURPOSE: Verbal fluency, a task frequently employed in neuropsychological assessment, provides important word productivity data but little information about subjective effort associated with demand monitoring and resource allocation. In two experiments, this study investigated the effects of task variables (semantic vs. phonemic cues; alternating vs. nonalternating conditions) and personal factors (fear of negative evaluation and trait anxiety) on subjective effort for a wide variety of verbal fluency tasks in neurotypical individuals. METHOD: Twenty-one adults completed eight verbal fluency tasks in Experiment 1. The tasks were selected to examine effort reported for verbal fluency that differed in (a) cue types and (b) the disruptions of clustering strategies. In Experiment 2, a separate group of 50 adults completed two verbal fluency tasks twice in separate sessions. Participants also completed social-emotional measures including fear of negative evaluation and trait anxiety. Working memory was assessed as a control variable. RESULTS: Experiment 1 showed greater effort for completing semantic than phonemic cue tasks and greater effort for alternating than nonalternating conditions. Alternating semantic verbal fluency yielded the greatest effort among all tasks. Differences in effort could not be accounted for by performance alone. Experiment 2 showed that greater fear toward negative evaluation was associated with greater effort. The relationship between fear and effort was not related to trait anxiety or moderated by performance levels or repeated testing. CONCLUSIONS: Knowledge about factors that impact subjective effort in neurotypical individuals is fundamental to accurate interpretation of effort reported by clinical populations. This study demonstrated the multifaceted nature of subjective effort that could not be accounted for by performance alone. In addition to task variables, effort assessment needs to consider the impact of social-emotional factors such as fear toward negative evaluation.

Emotional and Non-Emotional Verbal Fluency in Native and Non-Native Speakers.

OBJECTIVE: Native speakers frequently outperform non-native speakers on classic semantic verbal fluency tasks that target concrete non-emotional word retrieval. Much less is known about performance differences in retrieval of emotional words, which are abstract and crucial to social-emotional competence. This study compared native and non-native speakers' verbal productivity on emotional and non-emotional verbal fluency tasks. METHOD: Forty-seven native and 37 non-native speakers of English participated in the study. Participants completed seven semantic verbal fluency tasks in English including classic semantic (e.g., "animals"), action (e.g., "things people do"), and emotional variants (e.g., "things that make people happy"). Subjective and objective measures of English proficiency, information about language usage, and cognitive measures (working memory) were obtained for each participant. RESULTS: Verbal productivity for classic semantic, action, and emotional verbal fluency was lower for non-native speakers. Smaller language-specific vocabulary in non-native speakers did not moderate positivity biases in emotional verbal fluency. Subjective and objective language proficiency measures were less predictive of performance on the emotional than the non-emotional verbal fluency tasks. CONCLUSION: Non-native speakers perform more poorly than native speakers on semantic verbal fluency in English for both emotional and non-emotional variants. Positivity biases are not moderated by language proficiency and are reliable features of emotional verbal fluency. Proficiency measures may be less effective in predicting generation of emotional than neutral words.

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.

Taxonomic Development in Young Bilingual Children: Task Matters, and So Does Scoring Method.

Purpose Taxonomic awareness is central to vocabulary development and assessment. While taxonomic development appears largely unaffected by environmental factors, the impact of divided language input on distinct levels of the taxonomic hierarchy is unclear. The influence of scoring method on tasks that target distinct levels of the taxonomic hierarchy is unexamined. Method Twenty-seven English-speaking monolingual children, 46 Mandarin-English bilingual children, and 33 Spanish-English bilingual children, ages 4-7 years, participated. We measured superordinate awareness with a category association task, coordinate awareness with a contrast association task, and vocabulary size with a picture-naming task. All bilinguals completed the tasks in both languages to generate single-language (English) scores and conceptual scores. Results Single-language scoring indicated that bilingual children named fewer pictures and produced fewer superordinate-level responses in English than monolinguals. All language groups demonstrated comparable coordinate awareness. Importantly, conceptual scoring removed the bilingual disadvantage in both naming and category association tasks and revealed a bilingual advantage in coordinate awareness. Finally, the Mandarin-English and Spanish-English bilingual children performed comparably in all analyses despite differences in heritage language features and sociocultural support for bilingual development. Conclusion Depending on task demand and scoring method, bilingual children exhibited slower, comparable, and faster development in taxonomic knowledge in comparison to monolingual controls. This study highlights the nuanced effect of bilingualism on different levels of the taxonomic hierarchy and the impact of scoring methods on measuring vocabulary depth. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.12315683.

The Emotional Verbal Fluency Task: A Close Examination of Verbal Productivity and Lexical-Semantic Properties.

Purpose Emotional verbal fluency (Emo-VF) has the potential to expand neuropsychological assessment by providing information about affective memory retrieval. The usability of Emo-VF is limited, however, by significant variations in task administration and the lack of information about Emo-VF responses. This study investigated verbal productivity and the lexical-semantic properties of responses on positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Comparing Emo-VF to non-Emo-VF tasks used regularly in neuropsychological assessment provided additional information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks. Method Twenty-five adult native speakers provided verbal responses to three Emo-VF ("happy," "sad," "negative emotions") and two non-Emo-VF categories ("animals," "things people do"). Verbal productivity was measured at the word and syllable levels. Multiple large-scale data corpora were used to estimate the lexical-semantic properties of the verbal responses. Results There was a robust positivity bias in verbal productivity within Emo-VF tasks. Emo-VF tasks tended to elicit longer words than "animals" and "things people do," which might impact the results of verbal productivity analyses, especially in comparisons with "things people do." Within Emo-VF tasks, negative Emo-VF elicited words from a wider range of valence than positive Emo-VF tasks. Similarities (e.g., word length and complexity) and differences (e.g., concreteness, age of acquisition) were found between positive and negative Emo-VF tasks. Conclusions The study provided information about the basic characteristics of Emo-VF tasks, which included evidence for a robust positivity bias, suggestions for analyses of verbal productivity (e.g., consideration of word length), and lexical-semantic properties associated with positive and negative Emo-VF tasks using corpora data.

The Downside of Greater Lexical Influences: Selectively Poorer Speech Perception in Noise.

Purpose: Although lexical information influences phoneme perception, the extent to which reliance on lexical information enhances speech processing in challenging listening environments is unclear. We examined the extent to which individual differences in lexical influences on phonemic processing impact speech processing in maskers containing varying degrees of linguistic information (2-talker babble or pink noise). Method: Twenty-nine monolingual English speakers were instructed to ignore the lexical status of spoken syllables (e.g., gift vs. kift) and to only categorize the initial phonemes (/g/ vs. /k/). The same participants then performed speech recognition tasks in the presence of 2-talker babble or pink noise in audio-only and audiovisual conditions. Results: Individuals who demonstrated greater lexical influences on phonemic processing experienced greater speech processing difficulties in 2-talker babble than in pink noise. These selective difficulties were present across audio-only and audiovisual conditions. Conclusion: Individuals with greater reliance on lexical processes during speech perception exhibit impaired speech recognition in listening conditions in which competing talkers introduce audible linguistic interferences. Future studies should examine the locus of lexical influences/interferences on phonemic processing and speech-in-speech processing.