Languages and Psychotherapy: The Effect of Foreign Language on Fear Extinction.

BACKGROUND: Using a foreign language can influence emotion modulation, but whether different psychotherapy processes would be affected by a foreign language is still unclear. The current study explored the foreign language effect on the extinction of fear. METHOD: During the conditioning phase, part of the neutral stimuli presented to the participants were associated with a threat, while they performed a countdown task in their native language. In the extinction phase, participants performed the same task either in their native/foreign language and were informed that the threat would no longer appear. We collected self-reports of fear, and pupil dilation and electrodermal activity as physiological measures of arousal. RESULTS: Extinction was successful, indicated by greater self-reported fear and pupil dilation during the threat condition compared to neutral in the conditioning phase, but no significant differences during extinction. Although the foreign language group presented higher arousal, fear extinction occurred regardless of the linguistic context. CONCLUSIONS: Fear extinction via verbal instructions is equally effective in a foreign and a native language context. These results indicate that evidence should be continue to be gathered on the role of foreign languages using basic paradigms with clinical applications.

Morphological processing in the brain: The good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding).

There is considerable behavioral evidence that morphologically complex words such as 'tax-able' and 'kiss-es' are processed and represented combinatorially. In other words, they are decomposed into their constituents 'tax' and '-able' during comprehension (reading or listening), and producing them might also involve on-the-spot combination of these constituents (especially for inflections). However, despite increasing amount of neurocognitive research, the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are still not fully understood. The purpose of this critical review is to offer a comprehensive overview on the state-of-the-art of the research on the neural mechanisms of morphological processing. In order to take into account all types of complex words, we include findings on inflected, derived, and compound words presented both visually and aurally. More specifically, we cover a wide range of electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG, respectively) as well as structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (s/fMRI) studies that focus on morphological processing. We present the findings with respect to the temporal course and localization of morphologically complex word processing. We summarize the observed findings, their interpretations with respect to current psycholinguistic models, and discuss methodological approaches as well as their possible limitations.

Agreement and illusion of disagreement: An ERP study on Basque.

Agreement is a syntactic relation involving a controller (e.g., a noun) and a target with matching inflectional morphology (e.g., a verb). Across languages, electrophysiological studies consistently report that the presence of a mismatch yields late positive effects (P600), often preceded by early negativities. The current study focuses on person agreement in Basque to investigate whether online processing routines are modulated by the relative semantic prominence of nominal and verbal person features. In an event-related potentials experiment in Basque, we manipulated the semantic markedness of nominal and verbal person features, creating 1st (marked) and 3rd (unmarked) person correct and incorrect sentences [Japoniarrok1pleuskara ikasi dugu1pl/*dute3plgustora (We Japanese have1pl/*3pl learn Basque with pleasure); Japoniarrek3pleuskara ikasi dute3pl/*dugu1pl gustora (The Japanese have3pl/*1pl learnt Basque with pleasure)]. Both mismatches elicited an N400 effect, but only marked 1st person mismatches (Japoniarrok1pl … *dute3.pl) generated a P600, suggesting that (i) mismatches with unmarked 3rd person subjects (Japoniarrek3.pl… *dugu1.pl) are not treated as outright violations; (ii) the emergence of late positive effects is sensitive to fine-grained discourse information. Overall, these results call for a revision in the analysis of agreement relations from a theoretical and a processing perspective.

Online Adaptation to Altered Auditory Feedback Is Predicted by Auditory Acuity and Not by Domain-General Executive Control Resources.

When a speaker's auditory feedback is altered, he adapts for the perturbation by altering his own production, which demonstrates the role of auditory feedback in speech motor control. In the present study, we explored the role of auditory acuity and executive control in this process. Based on the DIVA model and the major cognitive control models, we expected that higher auditory acuity, and better executive control skills would predict larger adaptation to the alteration. Thirty-six Spanish native speakers performed an altered auditory feedback experiment, executive control (numerical Stroop, Simon and Flanker) tasks, and auditory acuity tasks (loudness, pitch, and melody pattern discrimination). In the altered feedback experiment, participants had to produce the pseudoword "pep" (/pep/) while perceiving their auditory feedback in real time through earphones. The auditory feedback was first unaltered and then progressively altered in F1 and F2 dimensions until maximal alteration (F1 -150 Hz; F2 +300 Hz). The normalized distance of maximal adaptation ranged from 4 to 137 Hz (median of 75 ± 36). The different measures of auditory acuity were significant predictors of adaptation, while individual measures of cognitive function skills (obtained from the executive control tasks) were not. Better auditory discriminators adapted more to the alteration. We conclude that adaptation to altered auditory feedback is very well-predicted by general auditory acuity, as suggested by the DIVA model. In line with the framework of motor-control models, no specific claim on the implication of executive resources in speech motor control can be made.

Foreign language comprehension achievement: insights from the cognate facilitation effect.

Numerous studies have shown that the native language influences foreign word recognition and that this influence is modulated by the proficiency in the non-native language. Here we explored how the degree of reliance on cross-language similarity (as measured by the cognate facilitation effect) together with other domain-general cognitive factors contribute to reading comprehension achievement in a non-native language at different stages of the learning process. We tested two groups of native speakers of Spanish learning English at elementary and intermediate levels in an academic context. A regression model approach showed that domain-general cognitive skills are good predictors of second language reading achievement independently of the level of proficiency. Critically, we found that individual differences in the degree of reliance on the native language predicted foreign language reading achievement, showing a markedly different pattern between proficiency groups. At lower levels of proficiency the cognate facilitation effect was positively related with reading achievement, while this relation became negative at intermediate levels of foreign language learning. We conclude that the link between native- and foreign-language lexical representations helps participants at initial stages of the learning process, whereas it is no longer the case at intermediate levels of proficiency, when reliance on cross-language similarity is inversely related to successful non-native reading achievement. Thus, at intermediate levels of proficiency strong and direct mappings from the non-native lexical forms to semantic concepts are needed to achieve good non-native reading comprehension, in line with the premises of current models of bilingual lexico-semantic organization.

Discriminating languages in bilingual contexts: the impact of orthographic markedness.

Does language-specific orthography help language detection and lexical access in naturalistic bilingual contexts? This study investigates how L2 orthotactic properties influence bilingual language detection in bilingual societies and the extent to which it modulates lexical access and single word processing. Language specificity of naturalistically learnt L2 words was manipulated by including bigram combinations that could be either L2 language-specific or common in the two languages known by bilinguals. A group of balanced bilinguals and a group of highly proficient but unbalanced bilinguals who grew up in a bilingual society were tested, together with a group of monolinguals (for control purposes). All the participants completed a speeded language detection task and a progressive demasking task. Results showed that the use of the information of orthotactic rules across languages depends on the task demands at hand, and on participants' proficiency in the second language. The influence of language orthotactic rules during language detection, lexical access and word identification are discussed according to the most prominent models of bilingual word recognition.

Is there a bilingual advantage in the ANT task? Evidence from children.

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that do not tap into linguistic processes. The origin of this bilingual advantage has been questioned in recent years. While some authors argue that the reason behind this apparent advantage is bilinguals' enhanced executive functioning, inhibitory skills and/or monitoring abilities, other authors suggest that the locus of these differences between bilinguals and monolinguals may lie in uncontrolled factors or incorrectly matched samples. In the current study we tested a group of 180 bilingual children and a group of 180 carefully matched monolinguals in a child-friendly version of the ANT task. Following recent evidence from similar studies with children, our results showed no bilingual advantage at all, given that the performance of the two groups in the task and the indices associated with the individual attention networks were highly similar and statistically indistinguishable.