Language diversity across home and work contexts differentially impacts age- and menopause-related declines in cognitive control in healthy females.

Menopause is associated with declines in cognitive control. However, there is individual variability in the slope of this decline. Recent work suggests that indices of cognitive control are mediated by communicative demands of the language environment. However, little is known about how the impact of bilingual experience generalizes across the lifespan, particularly in females who exhibit steeper cognitive decline due to increasing age and menopausal transition. Thus, we investigated whether diversity of language use in distinct communicative contexts modulated the effects of aging and menopause on cognitive control in an adult lifespan sample of healthy females. We performed robust linear regressions on a sample of 120 females (age range 20-65 years) to characterize age- (n = 120) and menopause-related (n = 59) declines in cognitive control (as assessed by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test) and to determine whether they are modulated by different facets of bilingual language experience, including the diversity of language use (i.e., language entropy) in home and workplace environments. Workplace but not home language diversity modulated age- and menopause-related declines in cognitive control, suggesting that females may compensate for decline by virtue of adapting to the externally imposed demands of the language environment. These findings have implications for identifying which aspects of bilingual experience may contribute to cognitive reserve in healthy aging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Message from the incoming editor.

The Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology (CJEP) publishes rigorous experimental psychology research through a fair and constructive review process. CJEP is supported and managed by the Canadian Psychological Association, who partners with the American Psychological Association with respect to journal production. CJEP represents world class research communities that affiliate with the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Sciences (CPA), and the Brain and Cognitive Sciences section of CPA. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Determining the importance of frequency and contextual diversity in the lexical organization of multiword expressions.

Corpus-based models of lexical strength have called into question the role of word frequency as an organizing principle of the lexicon, revealing that contextual and semantic diversity measures provide a closer fit to lexical behavior data (Adelman et al., 2006; Jones et al., 2012). Contextual diversity measures modify word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, while semantic diversity measures consider the semantic consistency of contextual word occurrence. Recent research has shown that a better account of lexical organization data is provided by socially based measures of semantic diversity, which encode the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Johns, 2021b). While most research on contextual diversity has focused on single words, recent corpus-based and experimental evidence suggests that an integral part of language use involves recurrent and more structurally complex units, such as multiword phrases and idioms. The aim of the present work was to determine if contextual and semantic diversity drive lexical organization at the level of multiword units (here, operationalized as idiomatic expressions), in addition to single words. To this end, we analyzed normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) using a set of contextual, semantic, and socially based diversity measures that were computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. The results confirm the superiority of diversity measures over frequency for multiword expressions, suggesting that multiword units, such as idiomatic phrases, show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Bridging interpersonal and ecological dynamics of cognition through a systems framework of bilingualism.

Human cognition occurs within social contexts, and nowhere is this more evident than language behavior. Regularly using multiple languages is a globally ubiquitous individual experience that is shaped by social environmental forces, ranging from interpersonal interactions to ambient language exposure. Here, we develop a Systems Framework of Bilingualism, where embedded layers of individual, interpersonal, and ecological sociolinguistic factors jointly predict people's language behavior. Of note, we quantify interpersonal and ecological language dynamics through the novel applications of language-tagged social network analysis and geospatial demographic analysis among 106 English-French bilingual adults in Montréal, Canada. Consistent with a Systems view, we found that people's individual language behavior, on a global level (i.e., overall language use), was jointly predicted by the language characteristics of their interpersonal social networks and the ambient linguistic patterns of their residential neighborhood environments, whereas more granular aspects of language behavior (i.e., word-level proficiency) was mainly driven by local, interpersonal social networks. Together, this work offers a novel theoretical framework, bolstered by innovative analytic techniques to quantify complex social information and empower more holistic assessments of multifaceted human behaviors and cognition, like language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Quest for Signals in Noise: Leveraging Experiential Variation to Identify Bilingual Phenotypes.

Increasing evidence suggests that bilingualism does not, in itself, result in a particular pattern of response, revealing instead a complex and multidimensional construct that is shaped by evolutionary and ecological sources of variability. Despite growing recognition of the need for a richer characterization of bilingual speakers and of the different contexts of language use, we understand relatively little about the boundary conditions of putative "bilingualism" effects. Here, we review recent findings that demonstrate how variability in the language experiences of bilingual speakers, and also in the ability of bilingual speakers to adapt to the distinct demands of different interactional contexts, impact interactions between language use, language processing, and cognitive control processes generally. Given these findings, our position is that systematic variation in bilingual language experience gives rise to a variety of phenotypes that have different patterns of associations across language processing and cognitive outcomes. The goal of this paper is thus to illustrate how focusing on systematic variation through the identification of bilingual phenotypes can provide crucial insights into a variety of performance patterns, in a manner that has implications for previous and future research.

The role of the ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex in idiom comprehension: An rTMS study.

Previous research is equivocal with respect to the neural substrates of idiom processing. Particularly elusive is the role of the left ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a region implicated in semantic control generally. Although fMRI studies have shown that the left VLPFC is active during idiom processing (see Rapp et al. (2012), for review), rTMS studies have failed to corroborate a clear role of this prefrontal region (e.g., Oliveri et al., 2004). We investigated this issue using a semantic meaningfulness judgment task that compared idiom comprehension following rTMS-stimulation to the left VLPFC relative to a control site (vertex). We also investigated whether individual differences in general cognitive capacity among comprehenders modulated the effects of rTMS. The results indicate that left VLPFC stimulation particularly affected the processing of low-familiar idioms, possibly because these items involve a maximal semantic conflict between a salient literal and less-known figurative meaning. Of note, this pattern only emerged for comprehenders with higher cognitive control capacity, possibly because they were more likely to activate or maintain multiple semantic representations during idiom processing, which required VLPFC integrity. Taken together, the results support the importance of the left VLPFC to idiom processing.

Sensorimotor and linguistic information attenuate emotional word processing benefits: an eye-movement study.

Recent studies have reported that emotional words are processed faster than neutral words, though emotional benefits may not depend solely on words' emotionality. Drawing on an embodied approach to representation, we examined interactions between emotional, sensorimotor, and linguistic sources of information for target words embedded in sentential contexts. Using eye-movement measures for 43 native English speakers, we observed emotional benefits for negative and positive words and sensorimotor benefits for words high in concreteness, but only when target words were low in frequency. Moreover, emotional words were maximally faster than neutral words when words were low in concreteness (i.e., highly abstract), and sensorimotor benefits occurred only when words were not emotionally charged (i.e., emotionally neutral). Furthermore, emotional and concreteness benefits were attenuated by individual differences that attenuate and amplify emotional and sensorimotor information, respectively. Our results suggest that behavior is functionally modulated by embodied information (i.e., emotional and sensorimotor) when linguistic contributions to representation are not enhanced by high frequency. Furthermore, emotional benefits are maximal when words are not already embodied by sensorimotor contributions to representation (and vice versa). Our work is consistent with recent studies that have suggested that abstract words are grounded in emotional experiences, analogous to how concrete words are grounded in sensorimotor experiences.

Bilingual lexical access in context: evidence from eye movements during reading.

Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French-English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension.

The multidetermined nature of idiom processing.

Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality: Some claim that idiomatic meaning is the result of compositional analysis initiated at the earliest stages of comprehension, whereas others claim that compositional analysis occurs only at late stages, subsequent to direct retrieval--especially for idioms that are highly familiar. We evaluated these alternatives in four experiments by using a variety of online and offline comprehension measures. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the normative characteristics of 219 idioms with respect to these predictions. Dimensions of interest included several measures of decomposability, familiarity, and word frequency of the idioms' verbs and nouns. In Experiments 2 through 4, we determined how these dimensions relate to several online measures of idiom comprehension. High familiarity was associated with good comprehension across all experiments; however, facilitative effects of decomposability were found only for tasks that required an overt semantic judgment. Word frequency, but not semantic decomposability of the idiom-initial verb, was associated with comprehension for some measures. These data support a model of idiom comprehension, according to which figurative meaning arises from the time-dependent availability of multiple linguistic constraints, and in which decomposability plays a limited role in the earliest stages of idiom comprehension. Normative data for 210 of the idiomatic phrases may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Anagram software for cognitive research that enables specification of psycholinguistic variables.

Anagram tasks are frequently used in cognitive research, and the generation of new scrambled letter combinations is a task well suited to a software solution. Most available programs, however, do not allow experimenters to generate new anagrams flexibly or to characterize existing anagrams using psycholinguistic criteria. They also do not provide detailed information on their source dictionaries. We present anagram software that interfaces with CELEX2, an internationallyrecognized psycholinguistic database. This software allows users to capitalize on lexical variables and thus enables direct control of psycholinguistic features that may influence the cognitive processes involved in anagram solution.

Age-related impairments in the revision of syntactic misanalyses: effects of prosody.

Two experiments examined whether young and older adults differ in comprehending sentences that contain temporary syntactic closure ambiguities. Experiment 1 examined age-related differences using the Auditory Moving Window (AMW) task, in which sentences were presented in a segment-by-segment self-paced fashion. Experiment 2 examined age-related differences using a sentence recall task, in which sentences were presented in their entirety. Sentences were constructed to have cooperating prosody (i.e., where prosody is consistent with the syntactic boundaries), baseline prosody (i.e., where prosody is ambiguous in the syntactically ambiguous region), and conflicting prosody (i.e., where cross-splicing relocates the prosodic phrase break at a misleading point in syntactic structure). The results showed that both young and older adults make comparable use of prosodic information to interpret temporary syntactic ambiguities, although younger adults may make use of this information more quickly than older adults. In addition, older adults appeared to be less able than young adults to revise initial syntactic misinterpretations caused by conflicting prosodic information. These results are interpreted with respect to age-related impairments in the allocation of working memory resources and inefficient inhibitory function during spoken language processing.

Contextual modulation of N400 amplitude to lexically ambiguous words.

Though much is known about the N400 component, an event-related EEG potential that is sensitive to semantic manipulations, it is unclear whether modulations of N400 amplitude reflect automatic processing, controlled processing, or both. We examined this issue using a semantic judgment task that manipulated local and global contextual cues. Word triplets (prime-noun-target, e.g., finance-bank-money) were sequentially presented on a computer screen (500 ms duration, 1000 ms stimulus onset asynchrony), in which the second word was a homograph. The first word (prime) created a neutral-, dominant-meaning- or subordinate-meaning-biased "global context," and the third word (target) created a dominant- or subordinate-biased "local context" that was either congruent or incongruent with the "global context" established by the first prime word. Participants were instructed to read all three words but to decide only whether the second and third words were semantically related. Event-related potentials (ERPs), specifically the N400, were recorded to the third terminal word. N400 amplitudes evoked by dominant meaning-related third words incongruent with the globally biased subordinate context (e.g., river-bridge-money) were significantly more negative than dominant endings in neutral contexts (e.g., taxi-bank-money), but not different from unrelated filler triplets. In addition, there was some indication that left hemisphere, temporal-parietal electrode sites were associated with greater N400 negativity for dominant targets in conflicting subordinate global contexts than homologous right hemisphere electrode sites, the latter of which showed significant activation to subordinate meanings in cooperating contexts. Thus, N400 amplitude was more affected by global than local context suggesting that controlled processes may take priority over automatic processes in modulating N400 amplitude, especially for left hemisphere electrode sites.