When It's Harder to than to Ignore: Evidence of Greater Attentional Capture from a Non-Dominant Language.

Aims And Objectives: Imagine you're driving and you become so distracted by the radio that you miss your turn. Which is more likely to have caught your attention, a broadcast in your native tongue or one in your second language? The present study explores the effect of language proficiency on our ability to inhibit irrelevant phonological information.

Methodology: Participants were asked to identify which of two drawings changed color while ignoring irrelevant words in either their native language, English, or a less proficient language, Spanish.

Covert Co-Activation of Bilinguals' Non-Target Language: Phonological Competition from Translations.

When listening to spoken language, bilinguals access words in both of their languages at the same time; this co-activation is often driven by phonological input mapping to candidates in multiple languages during online comprehension. Here, we examined whether cross-linguistic activation could occur when the input does not overtly cue words in the non-target language. When asked in English to click an image of a duck, English-Spanish bilinguals looked more to an image of a shovel than to unrelated distractors, because the Spanish translations of the words duck and shovel ( and , respectively) overlap phonologically in the non-target language.

The influence of native-language tones on lexical access in the second language.

When listening to speech in a second language, bilinguals' perception of acoustic-phonetic properties is often influenced by the features that are important in the native language of the bilingual. Furthermore, changes in the perception of segmental contrasts due to L1 experience can influence L2 lexical access during comprehension. The present study investigates whether the effect of L1 experience on L2 processing seen at the segmental level extends to suprasegmental processing.

Bilingualism and Musicianship Enhance Cognitive Control.

Learning how to speak a second language (i.e., becoming a bilingual) and learning how to play a musical instrument (i.

Parallel language activation and inhibitory control in bimodal bilinguals.

Findings from recent studies suggest that spoken-language bilinguals engage nonlinguistic inhibitory control mechanisms to resolve cross-linguistic competition during auditory word recognition. Bilingual advantages in inhibitory control might stem from the need to resolve perceptual competition between similar-sounding words both within and between their two languages. If so, these advantages should be lessened or eliminated when there is no perceptual competition between two languages.

Bilinguals Show Weaker Lexical Access During Spoken Sentence Comprehension.

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened for target words in spoken English sentences while their eye-movements were recorded.

The Bilingual Language Interaction Network for Comprehension of Speech.

During speech comprehension, bilinguals co-activate both of their languages, resulting in cross-linguistic interaction at various levels of processing. This interaction has important consequences for both the structure of the language system and the mechanisms by which the system processes spoken language. Using computational modeling, we can examine how cross-linguistic interaction affects language processing in a controlled, simulated environment.

Bilingual Two-Way Immersion Programs Benefit Academic Achievement.

The effects of bilingual education on reading and math achievement were examined by comparing test scores across different elementary-school programs. Results revealed that bilingual programs benefited both minority-language and majority-language students. Minority-language students in outperformed their peers in , while majority-language students in outperformed their peers in monolingual classrooms.

Musical experience influences statistical learning of a novel language.

Musical experience may benefit learning of a new language by increasing the fidelity with which the auditory system encodes sound. In the current study, participants with varying degrees of musical experience were exposed to two statistically defined languages consisting of auditory Morse code sequences that varied in difficulty. We found an advantage for highly skilled musicians, relative to lower-skilled musicians, in learning novel Morse code-based words.

The cognitive benefits of being bilingual.

Today, more of the world's population is bilingual or multilingual than monolingual. In addition to facilitating cross-cultural communication, this trend also positively affects cognitive abilities. Researchers have shown that the bilingual brain can have better attention and task-switching capacities than the monolingual brain, thanks to its developed ability to inhibit one language while using another.

CLEARPOND: cross-linguistic easy-access resource for phonological and orthographic neighborhood densities.

Past research has demonstrated cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and task-dependent differences in neighborhood density effects, indicating a need to control for neighborhood variables when developing and interpreting research on language processing. The goals of the present paper are two-fold: (1) to introduce CLEARPOND (Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities), a centralized database of phonological and orthographic neighborhood information, both within and between languages, for five commonly-studied languages: Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish; and (2) to show how CLEARPOND can be used to compare general properties of phonological and orthographic neighborhoods across languages. CLEARPOND allows researchers to input a word or list of words and obtain phonological and orthographic neighbors, neighborhood densities, mean neighborhood frequencies, word lengths by number of phonemes and graphemes, and spoken-word frequencies.

Bimodal bilinguals co-activate both languages during spoken comprehension.

Bilinguals have been shown to activate their two languages in parallel, and this process can often be attributed to overlap in input between the two languages. The present study examines whether two languages that do not overlap in input structure, and that have distinct phonological systems, such as American Sign Language (ASL) and English, are also activated in parallel. Hearing ASL-English bimodal bilinguals' and English monolinguals' eye-movements were recorded during a visual world paradigm, in which participants were instructed, in English, to select objects from a display.

Subcortical encoding of sound is enhanced in bilinguals and relates to executive function advantages.

Bilingualism profoundly affects the brain, yielding functional and structural changes in cortical regions dedicated to language processing and executive function [Crinion J, et al. (2006) Science 312:1537-1540; Kim KHS, et al. (1997) Nature 388:171-174].

Bilingualism and inhibitory control influence statistical learning of novel word forms.

We examined the influence of bilingual experience and inhibitory control on the ability to learn a novel language. Using a statistical learning paradigm, participants learned words in two novel languages that were based on the International Morse Code. First, participants listened to a continuous stream of words in a Morse code language to test their ability to segment words from continuous speech.