Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing.

Using code-switching as a tool to illustrate how language experience modulates comprehension, the visual world paradigm was employed to examine the extent to which gender-marked Spanish determiners facilitate upcoming target nouns in a group of Spanish-English bilingual code-switchers. The first experiment tested target Spanish nouns embedded in a carrier phrase (Experiment 1b) and included a control Spanish monolingual group (Experiment 1a). The second set of experiments included critical trials in which participants heard code-switches from Spanish determiners into English nouns (e.g., la house) either in a fixed carrier phrase (Experiment 2a) or in variable and complex sentences (Experiment 2b). Across the experiments, bilinguals revealed an asymmetric gender effect in processing, showing facilitation only for feminine target items. These results reflect the asymmetric use of gender in the production of code-switched speech. The extension of the asymmetric effect into Spanish (Experiment 1b) underscores the permeability between language modes in bilingual code-switchers.

The gender congruency effect during bilingual spoken-word recognition.

We investigate the 'gender-congruency' effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian-Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / 'find the scarf') and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects' name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed.

Audiovisual perceptual learning with multiple speakers.

One challenge for speech perception is between-speaker variability in the acoustic parameters of speech. For example, the same phoneme (e.g. the vowel in "cat") may have substantially different acoustic properties when produced by two different speakers and yet the listener must be able to interpret these disparate stimuli as equivalent. Perceptual tuning, the use of contextual information to adjust phonemic representations, may be one mechanism that helps listeners overcome obstacles they face due to this variability during speech perception. Here we test whether visual contextual cues to speaker identity may facilitate the formation and maintenance of distributional representations for individual speakers, allowing listeners to adjust phoneme boundaries in a speaker-specific manner. We familiarized participants to an audiovisual continuum between /aba/ and /ada/. During familiarization, the "b-face" mouthed /aba/ when an ambiguous token was played, while the "D-face" mouthed /ada/. At test, the same ambiguous token was more likely to be identified as /aba/ when paired with a stilled image of the "b-face" than with an image of the "D-face." This was not the case in the control condition when the two faces were paired equally with the ambiguous token. Together, these results suggest that listeners may form speaker-specific phonemic representations using facial identity cues.

Salience Effects: L2 Sentence Production as a Window on L1 Speech Planning.

Salience influences grammatical structure during production in a language-dependent manner because different languages afford different options to satisfy preferences. During production, speakers may always try to satisfy all syntactic encoding preferences (e.g., salient entities to be mentioned early, themes to be assigned the syntactic function of object) and adjust when this is not possible (e.g., a salient theme in English) or, alternatively, they may learn early on to associate particular conceptual configurations with particular syntactic frames (e.g., salient themes with passives). To see which of these alternatives is responsible for the production of passives when dealing with a salient theme, we looked at the second language effects of salience for English-speaking learners of Spanish, where the two preferences can be satisfied simultaneously by fronting the object (Prat-Sala and Branigan in J Mem Lang 42:168-182, 2000). In accordance with highly incremental models of language production, English speakers appear to quickly make use of the alternatives in the second language that allow observance of more processing preferences.

The interaction of subsyllabic encoding and stress assignment: A new examination of an old problem in Spanish.

This study employs a naming task to examine the role of the syllable in speech production, focusing on a lesser-studied aspect of syllabic processing, the interaction of subsyllabic patterns (i.e. syllable phonotactics) and higher-level prosody, in this case, stress assignment in Spanish. Specifically, we examine a controversial debate in Spanish regarding the interaction of syllable weight and stress placement, showing that traditional representations of weight fail to predict the differential modulation of stress placement by rising versus falling diphthongs in Spanish nonce forms. Our results also suggest that the internal structure of the syllable plays a larger role than is assumed in the processing literature in that it modulates higher-level processes such as stress encoding. Our results thus inform the debate regarding syllable weight in Spanish and linguistic theorizing more broadly, as well as expand our understanding of the importance of the syllable, and more specifically its internal structure, in modulating word processing.

Usage frequencies of complement-taking verbs in Spanish and English: data from Spanish monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals.

Verb bias, or the tendency of a verb to appear with a certain type of complement, has been employed in psycholinguistic literature as a tool to test competing models of sentence processing. To date, the vast majority of sentence processing research involving verb bias has been conducted almost exclusively with monolingual speakers, and predominantly with monolingual English speakers, despite the fact that most of the world's population is bilingual. To test the generality of competing theories of sentence comprehension, it is important to conduct cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing and to add bilingual data to theories of sentence comprehension. Given this, it is critical for the field to develop verb bias estimates from monolingual speakers of languages other than English and from bilingual populations. We begin to address these issues in two norming studies. Study 1 provides verb bias norming data for 135 Spanish verbs. A second aim of Study 1 was to determine whether verb bias estimates remain stable over time. In Study 2, we asked whether Spanish-English speakers are able to learn verb-specific information, such as verb bias, in their second language. The answer to this question is critical to conducting studies that examine when, during the course of sentence comprehension, bilingual speakers exploit verb information specific to the second language. To facilitate cross-linguistic work, we compared our verb bias results with those provided by monolingual English speakers in a previous norming study conducted by Garnsey, Lotocky, Pearlmutter, and Myers (1997). Our Spanish data demonstrated that individual verbs showed significant similarities in their verb bias across the 3 years of data collection. We also show that bilinguals are able to learn the biases of verbs in their second language, even when immersed in the first language environment. Appendixes A-C, containing the bilingual norms discussed in the article, may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

SPEECH SEGMENTATION IN A SIMULATED BILINGUAL ENVIRONMENT: A CHALLENGE FOR STATISTICAL LEARNING?

Studies using artificial language streams indicate that infants and adults can use statistics to correctly segment words. However, most studies have utilized only a single input language. Given the prevalence of bilingualism, how is multiple language input segmented? One particular problem may occur if learners combine input across languages: the statistics of particular units that overlap different languages may subsequently change and disrupt correct segmentation. Our study addresses this issue by employing artificial language streams to simulate the earliest stages of segmentation in adult L2-learners. In four experiments, participants tracked multiple sets of statistics for two artificial languages. Our results demonstrate that adult learners can track two sets of statistics simultaneously, suggesting that they form multiple representations when confronted with bilingual input. This work, along with planned infant experiments, informs a central issue in bilingualism research, namely, determining at what point listeners can form multiple representations when exposed to multiple languages.