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).

Are language-cognition interactions bigger than a breadbox? Integrative modeling and design space thinking temper simplistic questions about causally dense phenomena.

We affirm the utility of integrative modeling, according to which it is advantageous to move beyond "one-at-a-time binary paradigms" through studies that position themselves within realistic multidimensional design spaces. We extend the integrative modeling approach to a target domain with which we are familiar, the consequences of bilingualism on mind and brain, often referred to as the "bilingual advantage." In doing so, we highlight work from our group consistent with integrative modeling.

Eye movements and the perceptual span in disordered reading: A comparison of schizophrenia and dyslexia.

Increasing evidence of a common neurodevelopmental etiology between schizophrenia and developmental dyslexia suggests that neurocognitive functions, such as reading, may be similarly disrupted. However, direct comparisons of reading performance in these disorders have yet to be conducted. To address this gap in the literature, we employed a gaze-contingent moving window paradigm to examine sentence-level reading fluency and perceptual span (breadth of parafoveal processing) in adults with schizophrenia (dataset from Whitford et al., 2013) and psychiatrically healthy adults with dyslexia (newly collected dataset). We found that the schizophrenia and dyslexia groups exhibited similar reductions in sentence-level reading fluency (e.g., slower reading rates, more regressions) compared to matched controls. Similar reductions were also found for standardized language/reading and executive functioning measures. However, despite these reductions, the dyslexia group exhibited a larger perceptual span (greater parafoveal processing) than the schizophrenia group, potentially reflecting a disruption in normal foveal-parafoveal processing dynamics. Taken together, our findings suggest that reading and reading-related functions are largely similarly disrupted in schizophrenia and dyslexia, providing additional support for a common neurodevelopmental etiology.

From One Bilingual to the Next: An Iterated Learning Study on Language Evolution in Bilingual Societies.

Studies of language evolution in the lab have used the iterated learning paradigm to show how linguistic structure emerges through cultural transmission-repeated cycles of learning and use across generations of speakers . However, agent-based simulations suggest that prior biases crucially impact the outcome of cultural transmission. Here, we explored this notion through an iterated learning study of English-French bilingual adults (mostly sequential bilinguals dominant in English). Each participant learned two unstructured artificial languages in a counterbalanced fashion, one resembling English, another resembling French at the phono-orthographic level. The output of each participant was passed down to the next participant, forming diffusion chains of 10 generations per language. We hypothesized that artificial languages would become easier to learn and exhibit greater structure when they were aligned with participants' bilingual experience (i.e., English languages being easier to learn overall), or as a function of practice (i.e., languages learned second being easier to learn overall). Instead, we found that English-like languages became more structured over generations, but only when they were learned first. In contrast, French-like languages became more structured regardless of the order of learning, suggesting the presence of an asymmetric switch cost during artificial language learning. Moreover, individual differences in language usage modulated the amount of structure produced by the participants. Overall, these data suggest that bilingual experience impacts how novel languages are learned at an individual level, which can then scale up to cultural transmission of novel language at a group level.

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).

Bilingual Language Experience and Its Effect on Conflict Adaptation in Reactive Inhibitory Control Tasks.

We used machine-learning techniques to assess interactions between language and cognitive systems related to inhibitory control and conflict adaptation in reactive control tasks. We built theoretically driven candidate models of Simon and Number Stroop task data (N = 777 adult bilinguals ages 18-43 years living in Montréal, Canada) that differed in whether bilingual experience interacted with inhibitory control, including two forms of conflict adaptation: shorter term sequential congruency effects and longer term trial order effects. Models with continuous aspects of bilingual experience provided signal in predicting new, unmodeled data. Specifically, mixed language usage predicted trial order adaptation to conflict. This effect was restricted to Number Stroop, which overtly involves linguistic or symbolic information and relatively higher language- and response-related uncertainty. These results suggest that bilingual experience adaptively tunes aspects of the control system and offers a novel integrative modeling approach that can be used to pursue other complex individual difference questions within the psychological sciences.

The role of mentalizing capacity and ecological language diversity on irony comprehension in bilingual adults.

Diverse bilingual experiences have implications for language comprehension, including pragmatic elements such as verbal irony. Irony comprehension is shaped by an interplay of linguistic, cognitive, and social factors, including individual differences in bilingual experience. We examined the relationship between individual differences related to bilingualism, specifically, the capacity to understand others' mental states and ambient exposure to language diversity, on irony comprehension. We tested 54 healthy bilingual adults, living in a linguistically diverse region-Montréal, Canada-on an irony comprehension task. This task involved reading positive and negative short stories that concluded with an ironic or literal statement, which were rated on appropriateness and perceived irony. While both irony forms were rated as less appropriate and more ironic than literal statements, ironic criticisms (following a negative context) were rated as more appropriate and higher in perceived irony than ironic compliments (following a positive context). As expected, these ratings varied as a function of individual differences in mentalizing and neighborhood language diversity. Greater mentalizing patterned with more appropriate ratings to ironic statements in high language diversity neighborhoods and with less appropriate ratings to ironic statements in low language diversity neighborhoods. Perceived irony ratings to ironic compliments increased with mentalizing as neighborhood language diversity increased. These results indicate that pragmatic language comprehension and its social cognitive underpinnings may be environmentally contextualized processes.

Scratching your tête over language-switched idioms: Evidence from eye-movement measures of reading.

Idioms are semantically non-compositional multiword units whose meanings often go beyond literal interpretations of their component words (e.g., break the ice, kick the bucket, spill the beans). According to hybrid models of idiom processing, idioms are subject to both direct retrieval from the lexicon in early stages of processing, and word-by-word compositional reanalysis in later stages of comprehension. However, a less clear aspect is how disrupting an idiom's canonical form, and thus its direct retrieval, impacts the time course of comprehension. In this eye-tracking reading study, healthy English-French bilingual adults with English as their dominant language read sentences containing English idioms in their canonical form (e.g., break the ice), or in a switched form where the phrase-final noun was translated into French (e.g., break the glace). Thus, within this manipulation, momentary language switches modified the canonical form of idioms, while at the same time minimally altering the semantics of their component words, thus nudging readers towards a compositional processing route. Analyses of eye-movement data revealed switching costs in longer reading times at early (but not late) processing stages for idioms compared to matched literal phrases. Interestingly, the cost of language switching was attenuated by the availability of a translationally equivalent idiom in the non-target language (French, e.g., briser la glace). Taken together, these results suggest that direct retrieval is the preferential route in the comprehension of idioms' canonical forms, which acts as an effective repair strategy by the language-processing system when recovering the underlying form of modified idioms.

Age of Acquisition Modulates Alpha Power During Bilingual Speech Comprehension in Noise.

Research on bilingualism has grown exponentially in recent years. However, the comprehension of speech in noise, given the ubiquity of both bilingualism and noisy environments, has seen only limited focus. Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies in monolinguals show an increase in alpha power when listening to speech in noise, which, in the theoretical context where alpha power indexes attentional control, is thought to reflect an increase in attentional demands. In the current study, English/French bilinguals with similar second language (L2) proficiency and who varied in terms of age of L2 acquisition (AoA) from 0 (simultaneous bilinguals) to 15 years completed a speech perception in noise task. Participants were required to identify the final word of high and low semantically constrained auditory sentences such as "Stir your coffee with a spoon" vs. "Bob could have known about the spoon" in both of their languages and in both noise (multi-talker babble) and quiet during electrophysiological recording. We examined the effects of language, AoA, semantic constraint, and listening condition on participants' induced alpha power during speech comprehension. Our results show an increase in alpha power when participants were listening in their L2, suggesting that listening in an L2 requires additional attentional control compared to the first language, particularly early in processing during word identification. Additionally, despite similar proficiency across participants, our results suggest that under difficult processing demands, AoA modulates the amount of attention required to process the second language.

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 people and perspectives: General and language-specific social network structure predict mentalizing across diverse sociolinguistic contexts.

Mentalizing, or reasoning about others' mental states, is a dynamic social cognitive process that aids in communication and navigating complex social interactions. We examined whether exposure to diverse perspectives, afforded by occupying influential social network positions, predicted bilingual adults' performances on a behavioral mentalizing rating task in regions of high and low linguistic diversity. We calculated the degree to which respondents' social network position generally bridged unconnected others (i.e., general betweenness) and specifically bridged language communities (i.e., language betweenness). General betweenness predicted mentalizing performance regardless of region, whereas language betweenness only predicted mentalizing in a high linguistic diversity region, where bilingualism is ubiquitous and mentalizing to resolve perspective differences on the basis of language may be an adaptive cognitive strategy. These results indicate that human cognition is sensitive to social context and adaptive to the sociolinguistic demands of the broader environment. (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).

Does race impact speech perception? An account of accented speech in two different multilingual locales.

Upon hearing someone's speech, a listener can access information such as the speaker's age, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and their linguistic background. However, an open question is whether living in different locales modulates how listeners use these factors to assess speakers' speech. Here, an audio-visual test was used to measure whether listeners' accentedness judgments and intelligibility (i.e., speech perception) can be modulated depending on racial information in faces that they see. American, British, and Indian English were used as three different English varieties of speech. These speech samples were presented with either a white female face or a South Asian female face. Two experiments were completed in two locales: Gainesville, Florida (USA) and Montreal, Quebec (Canada). Overall, Montreal listeners were more accurate in their transcription of sentences (i.e., intelligibility) compared to Gainesville listeners. Moreover, Gainesville listeners' ability to transcribe the same spoken sentences decreased for all varieties when listening to speech paired with South Asian faces. However, seeing a white or a South Asian face did not impact speech intelligibility for the same spoken sentences for Montreal listeners. Finally, listeners' accentedness judgments increased for American English and Indian English when the visual information changed from a white face to a South Asian face in Gainesville, but not in Montreal. These findings suggest that visual cues for race impact speech perception to a greater degree in locales with greater ecological diversity.

I see what you mean: Semantic but not lexical factors modulate image processing in bilingual adults.

Bilinguals frequently juggle competing representations from their two languages when they interact with their environment (i.e., nonselective activation). As a result, both first (L1) and second language (L2) communication may be impeded when words share orthographic form but not meaning (i.e., interlingual homographs; e.g., CRANE, a machine in English, a skull in French). Similarly, bilinguals' reduced exposure to each known language makes bilingual lexical processing more vulnerable to larger frequency effects. While much is known about processes within the language system, less is known about how the bilingual language system interacts with the visual system, specifically in the context of image processing. We investigated this by testing whether commonly observed semantic (homograph interference) and lexical (frequency) effects extend to a visual word-image matching task. We tested 48 bilinguals, who were asked to determine whether an image corresponded to a written word that was presented immediately beforehand. By modulating the complexity of visual referents and the semantic (Analysis 1) or lexical (Analysis 2) complexity of word cues, we simultaneously burdened the visual and language systems. The results showed that both semantic and lexical factors modulated response accuracy and correct reaction time on the word-image matching task. Crucially, we observed an interaction between the image factor (visual complexity) with the semantic (homograph status) but not the lexical factor (word frequency). We conclude that it is possible for the language and image processing systems to interact, although the extent to which this occurs depends on the degree of linguistic processing involved.

Bilingual language experience and the neural underpinnings of working memory.

A longstanding question in cognitive neuroscience and in the bilingualism literature is how early language experience influences brain development and cognitive outcomes, and whether these effects are global or specific to language-related processes. The current investigation examined the effect of the timing of language learning on the performance and neural correlates of phonological and non-verbal working memory, subcomponents of executive function. Three groups of bilinguals, who varied in terms of the timing of second language learning (i.e., simultaneous bilinguals learned their two languages from birth; early and late bilinguals who learned their second language before or after 5 years of age, respectively), performed phonological and non-verbal working memory tasks in the magnetic resonance imaging scanner. Results showed that there were no group differences in performance on either of the tasks, or in the neural correlates of performance of the non-verbal task. However, critically, we showed that despite similar behavioural performance, the groups differed in the patterns of neural recruitment during performance of the phonological working memory task. The pattern of group differences was non-linear, demonstrating similar neural recruitment for simultaneous and late bilinguals that differed from early bilinguals. Findings from the current study suggest a dynamic mapping between the brain and cognition, contributing to our current understanding of the effect of the timing of language learning on cognitive processes and demonstrating a specific effect on language-related executive function.

Spoken Word Segmentation in First and Second Language: When ERP and Behavioral Measures Diverge.

Previous studies of word segmentation in a second language have yielded equivocal results. This is not surprising given the differences in the bilingual experience and proficiency of the participants and the varied experimental designs that have been used. The present study tried to account for a number of relevant variables to determine if bilingual listeners are able to use native-like word segmentation strategies. Here, 61 French-English bilingual adults who varied in L1 (French or English) and language dominance took part in an audiovisual integration task while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants listened to sentences built around ambiguous syllable strings (which could be disambiguated based on different word segmentation patterns), during which an illustration was presented on screen. Participants were asked to determine if the illustration was related to the heard utterance or not. Each participant listened to both English and French utterances, providing segmentation patterns that included both their native language (used as reference) and their L2. Interestingly, different patterns of results were observed in the event-related potentials (online) and behavioral (offline) results, suggesting that L2 participants showed signs of being able to adapt their segmentation strategies to the specifics of the L2 (online ERP results), but that the extent of the adaptation varied as a function of listeners' language experience (offline behavioral results).

The psychology of saying what you don't mean: Celebrating the research career of Professor Albert Katz.

Public Significance Statement The human capacity for language enables people to routinely produce and comprehend highly contextualized meaning, even when that meaning differs from or is completely opposite to the component words comprising an utterance or sequence of text (e.g., irony, metaphorical or idiomatic language, humor, and other forms of nonliteral language). In a career spanning more than 45 years, Professor Albert Katz of Western University has illuminated through his research the extraordinary ways that people accomplish this neurocognitive feat, which we all take for granted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Bilingualism: A Neurocognitive Exercise in Managing Uncertainty.

Bilinguals have distinct linguistic experiences relative to monolinguals, stemming from interactions with the environment and the individuals therein. Theories of language control hypothesize that these experiences play a role in adapting the neurocognitive systems responsible for control. Here we posit a potential mechanism for these adaptations, namely that bilinguals face additional language-related uncertainties on top of other ambiguities that regularly occur in language, such as lexical and syntactic competition. When faced with uncertainty in the environment, people adapt internal representations to lessen these uncertainties, which can aid in executive control and decision-making. We overview a cognitive framework on uncertainty, which we extend to language and bilingualism. We then review two "case studies," assessing language-related uncertainty for bilingual contexts using language entropy and network scientific approaches. Overall, we find that there is substantial individual variability in the extent to which people experience language-related uncertainties in their environments, but also regularity across some contexts. This information, in turn, predicts cognitive adaptations associated with language fluency and engagement in proactive cognitive control strategies. These findings suggest that bilinguals adapt to the cumulative language-related uncertainties in the environment. We conclude by suggesting avenues for future research and links with other research domains. Ultimately, a focus on uncertainty will help bridge traditionally separate scientific domains, such as language processing, bilingualism, and decision-making.

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.

Something old, something new: A review of the literature on sleep-related lexicalization of novel words in adults.

Word learning is a crucial aspect of human development that depends on the formation and consolidation of novel memory traces. In this paper, we critically review the behavioural research on sleep-related lexicalization of novel words in healthy young adult speakers. We first describe human memory systems, the processes underlying memory consolidation, then we describe the complementary learning systems account of memory consolidation. We then review behavioural studies focusing on novel word learning and sleep-related lexicalization in monolingual samples, while highlighting their relevance to three main theoretical questions. Finally, we review the few studies that have investigated sleep-related lexicalization in L2 speakers. Overall, while several studies suggest that sleep promotes the gradual transformation of initially labile traces into more stable representations, a growing body of work suggests a rich variety of time courses for novel word lexicalization. Moreover, there is a need for more work on sleep-related lexicalization patterns in varied populations, such as L2 speakers and bilingual speakers, and more work on individual differences, to fully understand the boundary conditions of this phenomenon.