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Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Scientific program
Abstracts
1. Handling two languages in one mind: On the consequences of
bilingualism on language processing and beyond
Albert Costa
In this talk I will review various current issues that are being explored in the domain
of bilingual language processing. I will pay special attention to issues related to
bilingual language control during speech production and the consequences of
bilingualism for language processing in general. I will also comment on the
consequences of bilingualism on the functioning of certain executive control abilities.
Finally, I will describe some recent studies conducted in my lab regarding sentence
comprehension in bilinguals.
2. Executive functions in bilingualism and second language acquisition
Anat Prior
Executive functions are a set of general purpose control mechanisms that regulate
cognition and action (Miyake & Friedman, 2012). The construct of executive function
includes three components: updating - the ability to constantly monitor and refresh the
content of working memory, inhibitory control – overriding dominant responses and
suppressing interference from distracters and shifting – flexibly switching between
cognitive sets or tasks. Recent research has suggested that bilinguals might use these
domain general mechanisms for managing competition between their two languages,
leading to enhanced executive function. However, there is still ongoing debate
regarding the specific details of bilingual executive advantages. In this talk I will
focus on the influences of bilingualism on inhibition and on shifting in young adults,
taking into consideration the characteristics of different bilingual populations. I will
also present preliminary data regarding the role of executive functions in learning a
second language in non-immersion settings.
3. Anglocentrism, Eurocentrism and Alphabetism in reading research and
practice
David Share
In recent years, there has been a growing recognition that studies of human behavior,
even in many domains traditionally regarded as universal and invariant, are actually
subject to substantial cultural and contextual variation (see, e.g., Henrich et al., 2010).
Concerns regarding generalizability have also been raised by researchers in
comparative linguistics (Evans & Levinson, 2009) who have questioned the
underlying assumption of structural universals common to all human languages. The
science of reading has also witnessed some rethinking (Frost, in press, Share, 2008).
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
This issue may be particularly acute in written language research since almost all
theory and practice has been largely shaped by work with monolingual Englishspeakers learning to read in their native tongue: Most of humanity do not learn to read
in either their native tongue or in alphabetic Roman-based writing systems. Of greater
concern perhaps, is the fact that English orthography is a particularly poor exemplar
even of European alphabets owing to its extreme ambiguity/complexity in terms of
letter-sound relations. I argue that the idiosyncracies of English spelling may have
confined contemporary reading science to a narrow Anglocentric research agenda
addressing theoretical and applied issues with only limited relevance for a
universalistic science of reading.
To redress this Anglocentric bias, a new generation of studies has emerged
comparing reading across a number of languages and orthographies. Unfortunately,
this newer work is almost exclusively focused on European (typically Roman-based)
alphabets and, furthermore, often embodies the assumption that European alphabets
are somehow superior or optimal writing systems. Not only has this alphabetic elitism
(or alphabetism) yet to be examined empirically, there are reasons to believe it may
ultimately prove to be false for most non-European languages.
4. What can we learn from Kanji reading about reading in general
Ayumi Seki
In Japanese orthography, three writing systems are used in parallel; two phonographic
systems- hiragana and katakana that mainly express inflections, and a logographic
system- kanji, that disambiguates the semantic meanings of homophones. The usage
of three different writing systems is constrained by various implicit rules.
Japanese Kanji have multiple ways of reading; more than one on-reading,
expressing the original Chinese pronunciation, and severalkun-reading, expressing
comparable native Japanese words. There are no explicit rules that determine how to
read kanji words, and reading relies, therefore on an acquired vocabulary. The most
successful strategy of reading unknown words or nonwords is to revert to the
statistical distribution of possible pronunciations. One such factor is consistency; how
consistently a character is read in words containing it. Thus, implicit learning ability
is one of the core skills to learn reading kanji.
We examined how various cognitive skills including vocabulary and implicit
learning abilities determine kanji reading in native Japanese college students. Implicit
learning abilities were measured with the serial reaction time (SRT) task and the
visual statistical learning task. The effect of consistency was significant for lowfrequency words and non-words, but not for high-frequency words. The ability to read
low-frequency words was strongly correlated with scores of the vocabulary test, and
SRT scores predicted non-words reading. The results will be discussed in terms of
various models of reading.
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
5. Mismatch responses to changes of Mandarin lexical tones in children with
typical and atypical language development.
Chia-Ying Lee, Ying-Ying Cheng, Pei-Wen, Yeh, and En-ju Lin
A large body of evidence has shown that not only general maturational changes to the
audtiroy and cognitive system but also continued experience with language are
responsible for the refinement of speech perception processes. In this talk, I will
present a series of studies to examine the maturation of mismatch responses (MMRs)
to Mandarin lexical tones. A multi-deviant oddball paradigm with a low dipping tone
(T3) as standard (80%) and high rising (T2) and high level tones (T1) as large and
small deviants (10% for each) was applied in adults, infants (aged from birth and 6
months old), and children (aged from 4 to 13 years old) with typical and atypical
language development. Both deviants elicited typical mismatch negativities (MMN)
in adults, while the MMN to the larger deviant is greater and peaked at approximately
100ms earlier than that to the small deviant. In infants and young children, the large
deviant T1/T3 elicited P-MMR in sleeping newborns. The transition from P-MMR to
adult-like MMN was evident in awaking infants at six months of age and remain
stable in all age groups of normal developing children. As for the small deviant
T2/T3, no significant MMR was seen in newborns. A P-MMR was found in infants of
6-month-old and remained in older groups. The adult-like MMN to T2/3 could only
be found in children older than 10 years old or those with high readin ability. Children
with atypical language development showed delayed MMNs to large deviant (T1/T3)
and absent or delayed MMR to the small deviant (T2/T3). Most importantly, the
MMRs to changes of lexical tones highly predict children’s behavioral measures on
phonological awareness (PA), rapid naming test (RAN), and Chinese character
recognition test (CCRT). These findings suggest the MMN and P-MMR index
different functional characteristics and provide information on when and how
children’s speech perception of lexical tones becomes automatic and thus serve as
neurophysiological markers for the early identification of children with language or
reading deficits.
6. Biliteracy development in children in French Immersion Programs in
Canada
Debra Jared
Findings will be reported from a longitudinal project that investigated reading
development in children who were learning to read in two languages simultaneously.
The children were native speakers of English who were enrolled in French Immersion
programs in Canada. One hundred and forty children were first tested in Kindergarten
on a battery of tests in both English and French, and their reading achievement was
tested yearly in both English and French from Grades 1 to 3, with word-level and
passage-level measures that assessed accuracy, fluency and comprehension. One
question of interest was whether any of the measures that were given in English in
Kindergarten could predict French reading achievement, that is, whether any of the
measures were cross-language predictors. Another question concerned the
relationship between French oral language development and French reading
development. In Grades 2 and 3 children also completed two experimental tasks. One
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
task examined whether word reading in one language was influenced by knowledge of
the other language. The second examined children’s statistical learning of letter cooccurrence patterns in English and French.
7. Corpus distributions: A road map for analyzing spoken and written
Hebrew
Dorit Ravid
Modern Hebrew is a century-old language that still carries with it the traces of its
4,000-year-old past in its lexicon, morpho-syntax and orthographic system.
Paradoxically, at this crossroads between its Classical origins and current usage, we
do not have adequate knowledge about the lexical and morpho-syntactic properties of
Modern Hebrew. The talk will argue for the urgent necessity of compiling
scientifically collected, tagged and coded spoken and written corpora. As a spoken
language, current Hebrew morpho-phonology diverges from its former periods so
much as to obfuscate the nature of standard speech. A systematically collected,
segmented, and tagged spoken corpus is needed in order to establish a new baseline
what is 'a Hebrew word', and what forms are 'correct' or 'incorrect' for contemporary
spoken Hebrew. As a written language, the reduced role of vowels in the normally
used 'unpointed' orthographic version makes it almost impossible to tag words
automatically without recourse to their context. Computerized parsing technology has
to be applied to the written corpus to establish algorithms to solve this essential
obstacle to frequency analysis of written unpointed Hebrew that would enable correct
psycholinguistic task design and the compilation of literacy measures.
8. A unified model for first and second language acquisition
Brian MacWhinney
The Unified Competition Model views first and second language learning as
depending on a shared set of socio-cognitive processes. Differences between the two
processes depend not on the expiration of a critical period, but on the operation of the
risk factors of local entrenchment, parasitism, negative transfer, and
isolation. Entrenchment is a neural process that arises from ongoing use of L1 across
years. Parasitism and negative transfer arise from the dominance of L1 during initial
L2 learning. Isolation arises from the tendency over time for L1 groups to reject the
participation of outgroup members and from increasing demands from the L1
group. These risk factors can be countered through the processes of resonance,
proceduralization, internalization, and participation that are available to all learners,
but which must become sharpened in adulthood to promote L2 acquisition. Evidence
for the combined operation of these processes motivates the specific shape of the
Unified Competition Model.
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
9. Taking models and neuroimaging to task: What do we know about how
people actually read?
Jason Zevin
Computational modeling and neuroimaging are both extremely powerful ways of
exploring cognition mechanistically. Interpreting either modeling results or brain
imaging data, however, is always complicated by task. It makes little sense to say "our
model simulates consistency effects" without some qualifications. Consistency effects
are most readily observed in naming tasks (as opposed to lexical decision, or semantic
tasks in which they are small or non-existent), and these are most readily simulated by
looking at how a model converts spelling to sound. Similarly, results from imaging
studies are often interpreted to mean that a particular area is sensitive to a specific
stimulus property, e.g., "the visual word form area is sensitive to word-likeness,"
when this sensitivity is actually highly dependent on the particular task and stimulus
parameters. In this talk I will explore how task can interact with the functional
organization of the reading system, and ask how approaches in which brain activity is
studied under more naturalistic conditions can be applied to ask questions about the
degree to which our understanding of the reading system is distorted by the tasks we
have used to study it. Perhaps not surprisingly, this turns out to be complicated.
10. The role of prior knowledge in word learning
Jay G. Rueckl
An important question about second-language acquisition concerns whether and how
it is shaped by the knowledge of one’s native language. In the laboratory, this
question can be addressed (in part) by examining the effects of prior knowledge on
word learning (or ‘artificial lexicon’) tasks. Thus, in several recent experiments
we’ve investigated how word learning is affected by the wordlikeness of novel printed
forms (i.e., the degree to which the novel forms are similar to extant words in their
orthographic and phonological properties). Not surprisingly, we’ve found that more
wordy novel words were learned faster at the form level. More interestingly, we’ve
also found that the meanings associated with more wordy forms were learned faster
too. fMRI results reveal that these effects are correlated with the activation of cortical
regions subserving phonological and semantic processing. These results can be
interpreted within a neurocomputational account of skilled reading and reading
acquisition—a framework that can be readily extended to L2 literacy acquisition.
11. A new paradigm for assessing individual differences in lexical quality of
newly-learned words
James S. Magnuson, Sergey A. Kornilov, Jeremiah Trudeau, Shin-Yi Fang
We used a recently developed artificial language paradigm to look at word learning
and lexical quality of newly learned words as a function of language ability. We used
a paradigm developed by Trudeau (2006) to probe predictions of computational
reading models regarding interactions of orthographic-phonological consistency and
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
semantics in word learning. Participants learned pronunciations of nonwords that
were consistent or inconsistent with dominant English patterns paired with concrete or
abstract definitions. We replicated Trudeau's interaction (larger influences of
concreteness for low- than high-consistency patterns), at the group level. We used a
behavioral battery to examine how individual differences in word learning relate to
other language-related cognitive abilities. We will discuss implications for models of
reading development and adult second language acquisition.
12. Functional and structural changes in children's brains while they acquire
literacy in their L1
Michal Ben-Shachar
Learning to read involves exposure to large amounts of print in a focused period of
time during childhood. How does this environmental transition affect cortical circuits
for visual perception and language processing? I will present data from a longitudinal
study in which we followed a group of 7-11 years old school aged children over a
period of 3 years (4 annual measurements), while they developed fluent reading of
English, their native language. Our study examined the relation between readingrelated skills, cortical function and white matter structure. Further, we assessed how
change in brain function and structure correlates with change in cognitive components
of reading. Functional measurements show that a region in left occipitotemporal
cortex increases its sensitivity to visual words over time. This cortical change
correlates with change in sight word efficiency, a measure of speeded visual word
naming. On the other hand, phonological awareness and non-timed reading measures
correlate with white matter properties in pathways connecting lateral temporal regions
through the callosum, as well as in the arcuate fasciculus. A functional dissociation
was found between the different branches of the superior longitudinal fasciculus.
Possible interpretations of these findings will be discussed within a general model of
the reading pathways.
13. Neural changes in cognitive control and in reading induced by training
executive functions
P.M. Paz-Alonso & M. Carreiras
Cognitive psychologists have begun to devise effective methods for training
cognitive abilities. Recent evidence suggests that some of the core ingredients of
cognition are susceptible to substantial practice-related improvements.
Nevertheless, little is yet known about the neural changes supporting these
improvements and to what extent the strengthening of executive functions
transfers to other domains, such as reading. Here, we present preliminary evidence
from an fMRI study aimed at investigating the neural changes in cognitive control
and reading abilities induced by training executive functions. Training modulated
the involvement of fronto-parietal networks in cognitive control and of critical
regions within the reading network.
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
14. Remember what you see in addition to what you hear: Behavioral and
fMRI evidence for orthographic contribution to verbal short-term
memory
Denise H. Wu, Esther Y.-C. Lin, & Hsiang-Yu Chen
Prominent theories of short-term memory (STM) all emphasize the importance of
phonology to retention of verbal materials while the contribution from other linguistic
information (e.g., orthography, semantics) has been ignored. However, accumulating
evidence suggests that verbal STM is jointly supported by multiple linguistic
components correspondent to orthographic, phonological, and semantic
representations in long-term memory. That is, the underlying mechanisms of verbal
STM are closely related to those of long-term linguistic knowledge. Similarly, the
organization and processing of verbal STM should reflect the characteristics of a
specific language to be retained. Because logographic characters of Chinese are
visually more complex than alphabetic letters, the correspondence between
orthography and phonology is less transparent, and there are abundant homophones,
reading and remembering Chinese should rely more on information additional to
phonology than reading and remembering alphabetic languages. In behavioral
experiments with a probed recognition task, participants’ STM of Chinese characters
was clearly affected by orthographic similarity of to-be-remembered stimuli,
irrespective of phonological similarity of the materials. Experiments with functional
magnetic resonance imaging further revealed that remembering homophonic or
orthographically similar characters was associated with higher activation in a leftlateralized network including the middle and inferior frontal gyri, the insula, the
middle temporal gyrus, and the junction of the fusiform gyrus. The findings from our
investigations provide converging evidence for the indispensable contribution of
orthographic representations to verbal STM of Chinese characters. The implications
of such findings to second language acquisition will be discussed.
15. Neurobiology of 1st and 2nd language learning
Kenneth R. Pugh
Converging evidence from neuroimaging research indicates that in typically
developing readers, skilled visual word reading (fluent decoding) in alphabetic
languages involves the development of a largely left hemisphere (LH) circuitry with
temporoparietal (TP), occipitotemporal (OT), inferior frontal, and sub-cortical
components (Pugh et al. 2010). In this presentation we will discuss key
cortical/subcortical interactions in the development of reading circuits, and the neural
pathways that most discriminate typically, from atypically, developing readers in
contrastive orthographies. We also consider new research (from our lab and others)
that examines neurodevelopmental trajectories for second language reading at
different ages. Finally, we also consider research on individual differences in learning
and consolidation skills and the implications of these neurocognitive skills for second
language literacy.
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
16. When bigger is better: using artificial language learning to study second
language learning
Inbal Arnon
Why are children better language learners, despite being worse at other cognitive
tasks? Previous accounts have focused on biological, cognitive or neural differences
between children and adults. Here, I focus instead on the linguistic units speakers
learn from and how those shape the construction of grammar. I suggest that children
are better at some aspects of language learning because they learn from linguistic
units that are larger and less analyzed than the ones adults employ and include multiword chunks like 'I-don't-know'. The hypothesis - which is novel in relating children's
better learning to the larger units they learn from and in emphasizing the role of larger
sequences in language use - makes concrete predictions about the differential role of
multi-word chunks in first and second language learning and processing. I explore
these predictions using an artificial language learning paradigm and discuss
implications for models of language representation and use.
17. What can artificial language studies tell us about second language
acquisition?
Kathy Rastle
Recent years have seen the publication of several studies that have used artificial
language methods to delineate the processes that underlie adult word learning. Yet,
questions have been raised about the inferences about natural language acquisition
that can be drawn from these laboratory studies. In this talk, I discuss three lines of
behavioural and neuroimaging evidence from my own research group, which provide
strong evidence that learning new words in laboratory conditions draws upon the
same mechanisms likely to underlie second language learning, and which highlight
several important constraints on the language acquisition process.
18. A new framework for understanding sources of comprehension difficulty
in bilinguals
Julie A. Van Dyke
A prominent explanation for comprehension difficulty in unskilled readers implicates
reduced working memory capacity (e.g., Just & Carpenter, 1992; Yuill et al., 1989;
Cain et al., 2004). This approach has recently been challenged by a growing body of
research fueled by precise measures of retrieval speed suggesting that the capacity of
active memory is extremely limited, even for monolingual, skilled readers. This has
led to the proposal of an alternative memory architecture—the “cue-based retrieval
model” (Lewis, Vasishth, and Van Dyke, 2006)—which focuses not on the size of an
individual’s memory, but rather on the efficiency of the retrieval mechanism.
Consistent with data from memory research, efficiency is determined simultaneously
by how well individuals utilize cues to retrieve items as needed, and the quality of the
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
linguistic representations being retrieved. On this account interference from similar
items held in memory becomes a crucial determinant of comprehension success. In
this talk, I will briefly describe the cue-based retrieval model and the evidence
supporting it, focusing on recent data from studies of individual differences in
monolingual reading ability. I will then discuss the relevance of this work for
bilingual research, making connections to recent arguments that bilinguals exhibit
enhanced inhibitory processing (e.g., Bialystock et al., 2004; Costa et al., 2008; Linck
et al., 2008). I will highlight key hypotheses derived from the cuebased retrieval
approach and describe foundational experiments with bilinguals, which may produce
a new understanding of the mechanisms through which knowledge of multiple
languages affects comprehension ability.
19. Word Recognition in Bilinguals
Wouter Duyck
In this talk, I will present an overview of our research on bilingual word recognition.
Many studies investigating the processing of words out-of-context have already
shown that lexical representations from both languages are activated when reading in
one language (language-nonselective lexical access). In our studies, we investigated
whether language-nonselective access generalizes to word recognition in L2 and L1
sentence contexts, providing a language cue and/or semantic constraint information
for upcoming words. Given that most earlier research on this issue focused on visual
word recognition, I will mainly discuss our recent findings for auditory word
recognition. Unlike written words, spoken language contains subphonemic cues that
provide a reliable marker of input language. I will also discuss effects of speaker
accent. The theoretical implications of these findings for theories of bilingual word
recognition will be discussed.
20. Pitch sensitivity as predictor of linguistic skills in first and in second
language
Merav Ahissar
We have used the seemingly simple 2-tone frequency discrimination task to tap
linguistic abilities in first and second language.
Manipulating the patterns of tone repetition across trials we manipulated the
demands of sensitivity to both sound frequency and its regularity.
We found that sensitivity to various versions of this task is a reliable predictor of
language and reading aptitude.
21. Neurobehavioral constraints on L2 skill consolidation: a motor sequence
learning perspective
Contact Avi Karni
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
22. Early identification and prevention of reading difficulties: How the
development of spoken language skills affect learning to read among
children with and without familial risk of dyslexia
Heikki Lyytinin
Children with familial risk for dyslexia have been followed for more than ten years
from birth in the Jyväskylä Longitudinal study of Dyslexia (JLD). The JLD has
examined developmental routes preceding dyslexia with a very rich assessment
program. The earliest predictive sign found in the JLD is atypical speech processing
and compromised categorical perception of speech sound observed using both
behavioural and brain measures. The association was still observable at school age in
perceptual test results which still explained the variance of spelling skill after
controlling for the contributions of other known predictors. A related compromised
developmental route preceding dyslexia is characterized by relative declining
development of phonological skills. From the age of 5 years when the assessment of
naming fluency becomes possible, the slow rate of retrieval of spoken responses
corresponding to serially presented familiar visual stimuli works as a partly
independent predictor of dyslexia and as a central feature of the second developmental
route towards dyslexia. The delayed development of letter name knowledge, i.e.,
compromised skill or interest in such learning, is a central pre-reading characteristic
of all those JLD-children who faced dyslexia at school age (with only few if any false
negatives), including those with typical development of receptive and expressive
language. In small subgroups the atypical early development of auditory and/or motor
skills also preceded delayed language development and poor acquisition of reading at
school age. The next goal was to implement a treatment program which could help
such children. A summary of the features of Graphogame we developed for this
purpose is given including results documenting its efficiency. For introduction,
please, consult grapholearn.info
23. One dyslexia, one person, two languages:
On the manifestation of dyslexia in multilingual readers
Naama Friedmann
Dyslexia is a general term for various deficits in reading. There are more than 15
different dyslexias, each stemming from a deficit at a different component of the
reading process or in the connections between these components. The different loci of
impairment cause differences in characteristics of the various dyslexias. Importantly,
the same dyslexia can manifest itself differently in different languages and
orthographies.
The talk will focus on cases of multilingual individuals with dyslexia
following brain damage or from birth. These individuals have one and the same type
of dyslexia in their two (or more) languages, but the different characteristics of the
orthographies induce different manifestations of the same dyslexia type.
Several types of dyslexia will be presented, including letter position dyslexia,
surface dyslexia, deep dyslexia, vowel letter dyslexia, and neglect dyslexia. For each
of these dyslexias, the manifestation in the different languages of multilingual
Second Language Acquisition: From Brain Plasticity to Cognition
Abstracts
individuals with dyslexia is different. The talk will show how properties of
morphology, of representation of vowels in the orthography, of the reading direction,
of the diglossic nature of a language, and of the existence of different letter forms for
different positions, modulate the manifestation of dyslexia in the different
orthographies read by the multilingual reader. It will also show how testing
multilingual speakers can inform open theoretical questions regarding dyslexia.