Language prediction in monolingual and bilingual speakers: an EEG study.

Prediction of upcoming words is thought to be crucial for language comprehension. Here, we are asking whether bilingualism entails changes to the electrophysiological substrates of prediction. Prior findings leave it open whether monolingual and bilingual speakers predict upcoming words to the same extent and in the same manner. We address this issue with a naturalistic approach, employing an information-theoretic metric, surprisal, to predict and contrast the N400 brain potential in monolingual and bilingual speakers. We recruited 18 Iranian Azeri-Persian bilingual speakers and 22 Persian monolingual speakers. Subjects listened to a story in Persian while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Bayesian item-level analysis was used. While in monolingual speakers N400 was sensitive to information-theoretic properties of both the current and previous words, in bilingual speakers N400 reflected the properties of the previous word only. Our findings show evidence for a processing delay in bilingual speakers which is consistent with prior research.

A comparison of learning and retention of a syntactic construction between Cantonese-speaking children with and without DLD in a priming task.

Procedural circuit Deficit Hypothesis (PDH) of Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) predicts problems with learning and retention of grammar. Twenty 7- to 9-year-old Cantonese-speaking children with DLD and their typically developing (TD) age peers participated in a syntactic priming task that was given in two sessions one week apart. Production of Indirect Object Relative Clause (IORC) was tested using a probe test before and after the priming task, and one week later. The study involved two cycles of learning and retention, and two levels of prior knowledge. Bayesian linear mixed effects modelling was used for data analysis. Children with DLD learned, and possibly retained, IORC less well than TD children after age, working memory and general grammatical knowledge were controlled for. No interaction effects were significant, meaning that cycle and prior knowledge affected both groups similarly in learning and retention. Results were discussed in relation to PDH and the Complementary Learning Systems Theory.

Developing psycholinguistic norms for action pictures in Cantonese.

The purpose of this study was to establish psycholinguistic norms for 249 action pictures in Cantonese, a language with few norms available. We provide normative data for rated visual complexity, rated age of acquisition, name agreement, word frequency and rated familiarity in this study. Forty participants were recruited to participate in both timed picture naming and rating experiments. The linear mixed effect analysis revealed that familiarity, visual complexity, and name agreement were significant predictors of action naming in Cantonese. However, AoA did not show any significant effect on action naming, which is consistently observed in previous studies of action picture naming in Chinese. The possible explanation for null effect of AoA on naming latency are discussed. This set of psycholinguistic norms in Cantonese could serve as a valuable resource for future psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies in Cantonese.

Picture naming in bilingual and monolingual Chinese speakers: Capturing similarity and variability.

Picture-naming latency differs across languages in bilingual speakers. We compared the effects of key psycholinguistic variables on picture naming among two groups of Chinese bilingual speakers and Mandarin monolingual speakers. First, we asked bilingual and monolingual speakers to estimate the age of acquisition, familiarity, visual complexity, name agreement, and imageability of a set of object and action pictures in Mandarin and Cantonese. Next, we recruited 60 Cantonese-English speakers, 50 Mandarin-Cantonese bilingual speakers, and 30 monolingual speakers who named the object and action pictures in Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively. We observed variability in the effects of item-level characteristics among groups, suggesting an interaction between item-level and individual-level characteristics as predicted. This variability was higher in bilingual speakers who spoke similar languages (Mandarin-Cantonese) in comparison to those speaking more distant languages (Cantonese-English). Our results suggest that monolingual norms and bilingual norms capture the same amount of variability; however, grammatical class interactions with other variables are explained differentially by the bilingual and monolingual norms. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of norming studies for timed picture naming and effects of bilingualism on language processing.

The Effects of Dysphonic Voice on Speech Intelligibility in Cantonese-Speaking Adults.

Purpose This study aims to investigate the effects of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese-speaking adults. Method Speech recordings from three speakers with dysphonia secondary to phonotrauma and three speakers with healthy voices were presented to 30 healthy listeners (15 men and 15 women; M age = 22.7 years) under six noise conditions (signal-to-noise ratio [SNR] -10, SNR -5, SNR 0, SNR +5, SNR +10) and quiet conditions. The speech recordings were composed of sentences with five different lengths: five syllables, eight syllables, 10 syllables, 12 syllables, and 15 syllables. The effects of speaker's voice quality, background noise condition, and sentence length on speech intelligibility were examined. Speech intelligibility scores were calculated based on the listener's correct judgment of the number of syllables heard as a percentage of the total syllables in each stimulus. Results Dysphonic voices, as compared to healthy voices, were significantly more affected by background noise. Speech presented with dysphonic voices was significantly less intelligible than speech presented with healthy voices under unfavorable SNR conditions (SNR -10, SNR -5, and SNR 0 conditions). However, there was no sufficient evidence to suggest effects of sentence length on intelligibility, regardless of the speaker's voice quality or the level of background noise. Conclusions This study provides empirical data on the impacts of dysphonic voice on speech intelligibility in Cantonese speakers. The findings highlight the importance of educating the public about the impacts of voice quality and background noise on speech intelligibility and the potential of compensatory strategies that specifically address these barriers. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.13335926.

Lexical Access in Persian Speaking Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment.

INTRODUCTION: Word retrieval problems are among the limitations observed in children with specific language impairment during the initial schooling years. These restrictions are predictive of reading problems and poor performance at school. Additionally, studies on lexical access in Persian speaking children are scarce. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate and compare naming accuracy and latency in children with and without specific language impairment. METHODS: Twenty 7-9-year-old children with specific language impairment and 20 age-matched peers were recruited as the study participants. They were requested to name the 128 black and white line-drawing pictures from a Persian picture naming set for children, as rapidly as possible. We compared the effects of psycholinguistic variables on naming latency in the explored children with and without specific language impairment. RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects modeling presented an interaction between the research groups and the psycholinguistic variables. Significant main effects were found for name agreement (P≤0.00) and the age of acquisition (P=0.05) in children with typical language development; significant effects for name agreement (P≤0.00) and log frequency (P≤0.00) were revealed in children with specific language impairment. CONCLUSION: The obtained models indicated that psycholinguistic factors could differently affect the naming latency in children with and without specific language impairment. Factors that may have accounted for the findings are discussed in this paper.

Response Modality and the Stroop Task.

A long-standing debate in the Stroop literature concerns whether the way we respond to the color dimension determines how we process the irrelevant dimension, or whether word processing is purely stimulus driven. Models and findings in the Stroop literature differ in their predictions about how response modes (e.g., responding manually vs. vocally) affect how the irrelevant word is processed (i.e., phonologically, semantically) and the interference and facilitation that results, with some predicting qualitatively different Stroop effects. Here, we investigated whether response mode modifies phonological facilitation produced by the irrelevant word. In a fully within-subject design, we sought evidence for the use of a serial print-to-speech prelexical phonological processing route when using manual and vocal responses by testing for facilitating effects of phonological overlap between the irrelevant word and the color name at the initial and final phoneme positions. The results showed phoneme overlap leads to facilitation with both response modes, a result that is inconsistent with qualitative differences between the two response modes.

Phonology, Semantics, and the Comprehension-Expression Gap in Emerging Lexicons.

Purpose Children come to understand many words by the end of their 1st year of life, and yet, generally by 12 months, only a few words are said. In this study, we investigated which linguistic factors contribute to this comprehension-expression gap the most. Specifically, we asked the following: Are phonological neighborhood density, semantic neighborhood density, and word frequency (WF) significant predictors of the probability that words known (understood) by children would appear in their spoken lexicons? Method Monosyllabic words in the active (understood and said) and passive (understood, not said) lexicons of 201 toddlers were extracted from the Dutch Communicative Development Inventory (Zink & Lejaegere, 2002) parent-completed forms. A generalized linear mixed-effects model was applied to the data. Results Phonological neighborhood density and WF were independently and significantly associated with whether or not a known word would be in children's spoken lexicons, but semantic neighborhood density was not. There were individual differences in the impact of WF on the probability that known words would be said. Conclusion The novel findings reported here have 2 major implications. First, they indicate that the comprehension-expression gap exists partly because the phonological distributional properties of words determine how readily words can be phonologically encoded for word production. Second, there are likely subtle and complex individual differences in how and when the statistical properties of the ambient language impact on children's emerging lexicons that might best be explored via longitudinal sampling of word knowledge and use.

Morpho-syntactic complexity modulates brain activation in Persian-English bilinguals: An fMRI study.

The Persian language can be considered to have a relatively more complex and combinatorial morpho-syntax than languages like Chinese and English. For example, the Persian verbal system is largely constituted of light verb constructions, in which light verbs are combined with specific items coming from other grammatical classes to generate entirely new verbal entities. This study was designed to examine the mediating effect of language-inherent properties related to morpho-syntax on activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), a brain area involved in morpho-syntactic processing. To this end, 20 late Persian-English bilinguals were required to covertly generate verbs and nouns from object and action pictures, within a cued grammatical context. Consistent with predictions, the results of an ROI analysis revealed an interaction between task and language in BA 44 of the LIFG and its right homologue, with greater activation of this region during the production of Persian compared to English verbs. In contrast, there was greater activation of the BA 44 during the production of English compared to Persian nouns, consistent with the more effortful processing of their less proficient second language (English). The findings suggest that language-specific properties such as morpho-syntactic complexity can modulate the recruitment of Broca's area, over and above the more well-documented effects of language proficiency.