Studies using artificial language streams indicate that infants and adults can use statistics to correctly segment words. However, most studies have utilized only a single input language. Given the prevalence of bilingualism, how is multiple language input segmented? One particular problem may occur if learners combine input across languages: the statistics of particular units that overlap different languages may subsequently change and disrupt correct segmentation. Our study addresses this issue by employing artificial language streams to simulate the earliest stages of segmentation in adult L2-learners. In four experiments, participants tracked multiple sets of statistics for two artificial languages. Our results demonstrate that adult learners can track two sets of statistics simultaneously, suggesting that they form multiple representations when confronted with bilingual input. This work, along with planned infant experiments, informs a central issue in bilingualism research, namely, determining at what point listeners can form multiple representations when exposed to multiple languages.

In a recent study, Lew-Williams and Fernald (2007) showed that native Spanish speakers use grammatical gender information encoded in Spanish articles to facilitate the processing of upcoming nouns. In this article, we report the results of a study investigating whether grammatical gender facilitates noun recognition during second language (L2) processing. Sixteen monolingual Spanish participants (control group) and 18 English-speaking learners of Spanish (evenly divided into high and low Spanish proficiency) saw two-picture visual scenes in which items matched or did not match in gender. Participants’ eye movements were recorded while they listened to 28 sentences in which masculine and feminine target items were preceded by an article that agreed in gender with the two pictures or agreed only with one of the pictures. An additional group of 15 Italian learners of Spanish was tested to examine whether the presence of gender in the first language (L1) modulates the degree to which gender is used during L2 processing. Data were analyzed by comparing the proportion of eye fixations on the objects in each condition. Monolingual Spanish speakers looked sooner at the referent on different-gender trials than on same-gender trials, replicating results reported in past literature. Italian-Spanish bilinguals exhibited a gender anticipatory effect, but only for the feminine condition. For the masculine condition, participants waited to hear the noun before identifying the referent. Like the Spanish monolinguals, the highly proficient English-Spanish speakers showed evidence of using gender information during online processing, whereas the less proficient learners did not. The results suggest that both proficiency in the L2 and similarities between the L1 and the L2 modulate the usefulness of morphosyntactic information during speech processing.

No abstract

Most work investigating the role of convergence in situations of language attrition has focused on the morpho-syntactic restructuring of the dying language variety. A central concern of such research has been untangling the factors driving the restructuring with an eye towards establishing whether the changes observed are best viewed as externally driven or, by contrast, as internally motivated. A second and equally important concern of this research attempts to define the domains of the linguistic system that may be the most permeable to external influence. The present study provides a contribution to this line of research and sheds light on its two leading concerns from the domain of phonology and phonetics. Specifically, we present the results of an instrumental study of the phonological vowel system of Frenchville French and argue that this linguistic variety is undergoing a perceptually striking process of phonetic convergence with English that is motivated by the auditory and acoustic similarity between a subset of vowels in the contact languages. An interesting consequence of our analysis is that bilingual phonologies may become particularly permeable to inter-linguistic influence precisely where they are acoustically and perceptually unstable, and where they are already congruent to some degree.

The process of word segmentation is flexible, with many strategies potentially available to learners. This experiment explores how segmentation cues interact, and whether successful resolution of cue competition is related to general executive functioning. Participants listened to artificial speech streams that contained both statistical and pause-defined cues to word boundaries. When these cues 'collide' (indicating different locations for word boundaries), cue strength appears to dictate the predominant parsing strategy. When cues are relatively equal in strength, the ability to successfully deploy a segmentation strategy significantly correlates with stronger performance on the Simon task, a non-linguistic cognitive task typically thought to involve executive processes such as inhibitory control and selective attention. These results suggest that general information processing strategies may play a role in solving one of the early challenges for language learners.