Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This study recruited English monolinguals, Mandarin monolinguals, and Mandarin–English (ME) bilinguals to examine whether native English and native Mandarin speakers think about time differently and whether the acquisition of L2 English could reshape native Mandarin speakers’ mental representations of temporal sequence. Across two experiments, we used the temporal congruency categorization paradigm which involved two-alternative forced-choice reaction time tasks to contrast experimental conditions that were assumed to be either compatible or incompatible with the internal spatiotemporal associations. Results add to previous studies (...) by confirming that native English and native Mandarin speakers do think about time differently, and the significant crosslinguistic discrepancy primarily lies in the vertical representations of time flow. However, current findings also clarify the existing literature, demonstrating that the acquisition of L2 English does not appear to affect native Mandarin speakers’ temporal cognition. ME bilinguals, irrespective of whether they attained elementary or advanced level of English proficiency, exhibited temporal thinking patterns commensurate with those of Mandarin monolinguals. Some theoretical implications regarding the effect of bilingualism on cognition in general can be drawn from the present study, a crucial one being that it provides evidence against the view that L2 acquisition can reshape habitual modes of thinking established by L1. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 293-311.

According to usage-based theories, children initially acquire surface-level constructions and then abstract representations. If so, bilingual children might show lags relative to monolingual children early in acquisition, but not later on, once they rely on abstract representations. We tested this prediction with comprehension of passives in 3- to 6-year-old children: French–English bilinguals and English monolinguals. As predicted, younger bilingual children tended to be less accurate than monolingual children. In contrast, the older bilingual children scored equivalently to monolinguals, (...) despite less exposure to English. When the children made errors, the bilingual children were more likely to interpret the subject as the agent of the action than the monolingual children. These results are consistent with the argument that children develop increasingly abstract representations of linguistic constructions with usage. They further suggest that bilingual children might catch up with monolingual through use of selective attention and/or a semantic bias. (shrink)

Patterns of object naming often differ between languages, but bilingual speakers develop convergent naming patterns in their two languages that are distinct from those of monolingual speakers of each language. This convergence appears to reflect interactions between lexical representations for the two languages. In this study, we developed a self-organizing connectionist model to simulate semantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon and investigate the mechanisms underlying this semantic convergence. We examined the similarity of patterns in the simulated data to (...) empirical data from past research, and we identified how semantic convergence was manifested in the simulated bilingual lexical knowledge. Furthermore, we created impaired models in which components of the network were removed so as to examine the importance of the relevant components on bilingual object naming. Our results demonstrate that connections between two languages’ lexicons can be established through the simultaneous activations of related words in the two languages. These connections between languages allow the outputs of their lexicons to become more similar, that is, to converge. Our model provides a basis for future computational studies of how various input variables may affect bilingual naming patterns. (shrink)

The context-based use of terminology and phraseology is one of the essential building blocks of legal translation. The contextual nature of both components has implications when it comes to designing resources that are adapted to the needs of translators. For Arabic legal translation, there are a multitude of different print and online resources available, however, they do not integrate the context-related parameter for term choice acceptability. In this article, we will describe the main features of certain bilingual legal dictionaries (...) with the English-Arabic and French-Arabic language pairs. We will then make a descriptive assessment of the tools available online, highlighting their limitations. Taking into consideration all the contextual parameters involved in making a translation choice, we will put forward the value of developing bilingual ontologies with Arabic. With the rapid expansion of information technologies, a move towards formalizing legal knowledge will help fill existing gaps in the representation of Arabic legal content and the retrieval of information, providing legal translators with a tool that provides specific details that will enable translators to make informed and relevant decisions, in addition to opening new research perspectives for Arabic legal translation. (shrink)

As there are more and more bilingual couples who ran vlogs to share their bilingual and intercultural lives on the internet, this paper seeks to delineate the sources of motivation for these couples to disclose their privacy through vlogging. Based on the sample of selected vlogs, a qualitative analysis has been conducted to obtain the sociolinguistic picture of the bilingual couples’ motivations to attract wider audiences via the internet. The analysis of vlogs, informed by a multimodal theoretical (...) framework, focused on the audiovisual and textual content of vlogs with regard to the subjective representations of films and texts resulting from these couples’ individual stories. The conducted study spotlights vlogging activities of bilingual couples who feel the need to share their intercultural and bilingual experiences on the internet. Our data suggest that bilingual couples vlog to express their hybrid identities by sharing how they cope with challenges and overcome linguistic barriers, as well as find ways to enjoy cross-cultural understanding. The paper explores the linguistic and cultural diversity from a new perspective of private vlogs created and maintained by bilingual couples. It unfolds an account of the less studied online context in which partners of different ethnic backgrounds make their private lives public, and illustrates how bilingual couples generate ideas to filming and sharing online. (shrink)

Current research suggests that conceptual in?uences are primarily responsible for inducing synaesthesia, since numerous synaesthetic variants are triggered by linguistic symbols. These linguistic synaesthesias are the focus of the present review article. This article examines the literature on the transfer of synaesthetic colour-associations across languages and shows the scope of the linguistic mechanisms that are implicated. We review known evidence about the interaction between grapheme-colour synaesthesia and the acquisition of a second language, and specifically, we discuss cases of cross-linguistic transfer (...) in which a second language is learned later in life. Research on bilingual subjects has uncovered distinct representations in the brain for a mother tongue and for a later-acquired foreign language. Consequently, these differences have implications for synaesthesia associated with the writing systems of these different languages. By reviewing several individual cases of bilingual synaesthetes, we conclude that synaesthesia might have different types of influences on the acquisition of a second language, ranging from effects that support this learning to those that disturb it. (shrink)

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English proficiency (...) can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of verb-particle constructions (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb, (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g. The professor looked the student’s last name up.). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals’ reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with verb-particle constructions that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers’ reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants’ English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants’ explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty. (shrink)

For native English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets than orthographically related or unrelated primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense verb primes (...) significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency. (shrink)

Modulation of visual attention in the Visual World Paradigm relies on parallel processing of linguistic and visual information. Previous studies have argued that the human linguistic capacity includes an aspect of anticipation of upcoming material. Such anticipation can be triggered by both lexical and grammatical/morphosyntactic cues. In this study, we investigated the relationship between comprehension and prediction by testing how subtle changes in visual representations can affect the processing of grammatical case cues in Russian by Russian-German bilingual children (n (...) = 49, age 8−13). The linguistic manipulation followed previous designs, contrasting SVO and OVS sentences, where the first NP (NP1) was marked with nominative or accusative case, respectively. Three types of visual displays were compared: (i) individual referents (potential agent/theme); (ii) pairs of referents (NP1 + potential agent/theme); and (iii) events (representing interactions between the referents). Participants were significantly more sensitive to the case manipulation when presented with events compared to the other two types of visual display. This suggests that they were able to quickly integrate the thematic role information signaled by grammatical case in the event representations. However, they were less likely to use the case information to anticipate upcoming arguments when the target pictures represented individual referents or pairs of noninteracting referents. We hypothesize that the process of argument anticipation is mediated by the activation of syntactic templates (SVO or OSV, depending on the case marking on NP1). The relatively weak anticipation effect observed may be attributed to the absence, or weak representation, of the noncanonical OVS template in the bilingual children's long-term memory. (shrink)

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND REPRESENTATION IN THE SEMIOTIC OF JOHN POINSOT1 }AMES BERNARD MURPHY Dartmouth College Hanover, New Hampshire 1) Language and the Semiotic of John Poinsot HE SEMIOTIC of John Poinsot is to the study of gns what physics is to the study of nature. Physics is oth the most fundamental and the most general science of nature. All natural processes, from the motion of planets to the (...) division of cells, are governed by, but not only by, laws of physics. Similarly, the semiotic of John Poinsot (traditionally known by his Dominican name, John of St. Thomas) is the most fundamental and general science of signs. The actions of all signs -from natural signs such as footprints and symptoms of disease, to signs of communication, such as logical operators and linguistic signs, to signs in cognition, such as concepts and percepts -are governed by, but not only by, the fundamental relational logic of semiosis set forth in his Ars Logica [1632]. If C. S. Peirce can be said to give us a chemistry of sixty-six signcompounds, John Poinsot, suitably revised, gives us the basic physical laws of motion that bring sign, object, and mind into relation.2 i The author would like to acknowledge gratefully the fellowships received from the American Council of Learned Societies and from Dartmouth College supporting the research of this article. I also wish to acknowledge the help of my research assistant, Daniel Glazer, in hunting down many essential books and articles. John Deely assisted by correcting my discussion of some of the finer points of Poinsot's theory as well as by providing many other helpful suggestions for revision. 2 The first modern author to point this out was Jacques Maritain, especially in "Signe et symbole," Revue Thomiste 44 (April 1938), pp. 299-300 and 569 570 JAMES BERNARD MURPHY What I wish to explore here is the question: To what extent does the semiotic of John Poinsot account for the meaning of linguistic signs? In one sense, we cannot expect such a fundamental and general theory of the action of signs to tell us much about language. Language is a surpassingly complex and, in many ways, a unique sign-system. Expecting a general theory of signs to capture the meaning of the linguistic sign is like expecting physics to explain reproductive biology. In another sense, though, we ought to expect his semiotic to illuminate that preeminent system of signs, human language. For in addition to "Le Langage et la theorie du signe," Anne.:re au chapitre II of Quatre essais sur!'esprit dans sa condition charnelle (Nouvelle edition revue et augmentee; Paris: Alsatia, 1956), pp. 113-124. This latter essay appears in a modestly amplified English version, " Language and the Theory of Sign," from Language : An Enquiry into Its Meaning and Function, edited by Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 86-101; and, fully annotated in relation to Poinsot's Tractatus de Signis, it has been reprinted in Frontiers in Semiotics, edited by John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia Kruse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 51-62. Following Maritain, a number of authors have attempted to apply Poinsot's semiotic to contemporary debates. I note the principal ones in chronological order: John A. Oesterle, " Another Approach to the Problem of Meaning," The Thomist 7 (1944), pp. 233-263; John Wild, "An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Signs," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (December 1947), pp. 217-244; Henry B. Veatch, Intentional Logic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952). Poinsot's Treatise on Signs was originally published in 1632 as a small part of volume 2 in the original five volumes (Alcala, Spain: 1631-1635) of his philosophical writings. These five volumes have been published as three volumes under the title Cursus Philosophicus Thomisticus in the modern edition by Beatus Reiser (Turin: Marietti, 1930, 1933, 1937). The first independent presentation of Poinsot's complete Tractatus de Signis was prepared by John Deely in consultation with Ralph A. Powell and published in bilingual critical edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Since the publication of this edition of the Tractatus, two major critiques and reconstructions of Poinsot's analysis... (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes (...) the dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

The present study investigates the relations between L2-English proficiency and L1-Turkish lexical property evaluations. We asked whether L2 proficiency affects lexical properties, including imageability and concreteness ratings of 600 Turkish words selected from the Word Frequency Dictionary of Written Turkish. Seventy-two participants provided ratings of concreteness and imageability for 600 words on a 7-point scale. In order to assess their L2 proficiency, we administered Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-IV. We divided categories into two subcategories as high and low for the frequency, (...) concreteness, imageability, and age of acquisition. The relationship between these subcategories and imageability-concreteness was examined by mixed effects linear regression analyses. We found that L2 proficiency and imageability ratings were positively correlated and specifically, this positive association was evident for low-frequency words and later acquired words. Results are in line with the interaction of bilingual representation under the dual-coding theory which suggests that bilinguals develop an interconnected imaginal representation for two languages as opposed to separate verbal representations. As L2 proficiency increased, the imageability also increased. These findings have implications for literature investigating the relationship between L2 proficiency and linguistic outcomes. Additionally, findings point to the importance of considering the L2 proficiency of participants when lexical tasks that involve cue words or word lists are used. (shrink)

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers’ temporal reasoning. The tasks measure how people spatialize time in three-dimensional space, including (...) the sagittal (front/back), transverse (left/right), and vertical (up/down) axes. Results of Experiment 1 show that people automatically create spatial representations in the course of temporal reasoning, and these implicit spatializations differ in accordance with patterns in language, even in a non-linguistic task. Both groups showed evidence of a left-to-right representation of time, in accordance with writing direction, but only Mandarin speakers showed a vertical top-to-bottom pattern for time (congruent with vertical spatiotemporal metaphors in Mandarin). Results of Experiment 2 confirm and extend these findings, showing that bilinguals’ representations of time depend on both long-term and proximal aspects of language experience. Participants who were more proficient in Mandarin were more likely to arrange time vertically (an effect of previous language experience). Further, bilinguals were more likely to arrange time vertically when they were tested in Mandarin than when they were tested in English (an effect of immediate linguistic context). (shrink)

There are two contending models regarding the processing of negation: the fusion model and the schema-plus-tag model. Most previous studies have centered on negation in languages such as English and Mandarin, where negators are positioned before predicates. Mongolian, quite uniquely, is a language whose negators are post-verbal, making them natural replicas of the schema-plus-tag model. The present study aims to investigate the representation process of Mongolian contradictory negative sentences to shed light on the debate between the models, meanwhile verifying (...) the post-verbal effect of negators. A series of experiments using the sentence–picture verification paradigm supports the fusion model: Mongolian contradictory negative sentences were processed by representing the actual conditions rather than the negated state of affairs at 250 ISI, and despite the fact that a post-verbal effect of negators was measured at 250 ISI when Mongolian and Mandarin negative sentences were compared, Mongolian–Mandarin bilinguals adopted the same representational strategy for contradictory negation in both languages. (shrink)

The hypothesis that word representations are emotionally impoverished in a second language (L2) has variable support. However, this hypothesis has only been tested using tasks that present words in isolation or that require laboratory-specific decisions. Here, we recorded eye movements for 34 bilinguals who read sentences in their L2 with no goal other than comprehension, and compared them to 43 first language readers taken from our prior study. Positive words were read more quickly than neutral words in the L2 across (...) first-pass reading time measures. However, this emotional advantage was absent for negative words for the earliest measures. Moreover, negative words but not positive words were influenced by concreteness, frequency and L2 proficiency in a manner similar to neutral words. Taken together, the findings suggest that only negative words are at risk of emotional disembodiment during L2 reading, perhaps because a positivity bias in L2 experiences ensures that positive words are emotionally grounded. (shrink)

The present study uses EEG time-frequency representations with a Flanker task to investigate if and how individual differences in bilingual language experience modulate neurocognitive outcomes in two bilingual group types: late bilinguals and early bilinguals. TFRs were computed for both incongruent and congruent trials. The difference between the two was then compared between the HSs and the L2 learners, modeled as a function of individual differences with bilingual experience within each group separately and probed for its potential (...) symmetry between brain and behavioral data. We found no differences at the behavioral and neural levels for the between-groups comparisons. However, oscillatory dynamics of inhibition and cognitive control were found to be modulated by individual differences in bilingual language experience, albeit distinctly within each bilingual group. While the results indicate adaptations toward differential brain recruitment in line with bilingual language experience variation overall, this does not manifest uniformly. Rather, earlier versus later onset to bilingualism—the bilingual type—seems to constitute an independent qualifier to how individual differences play out. (shrink)

Wales uses languages with both regular (Welsh) and irregular (English) counting systems. Three groups of 6- and 8-year-old Welsh children with varying degrees of exposure to the Welsh language—those who spoke Welsh at both home and school; those who spoke Welsh only at home; and those who spoke only English—were given standardized tests of arithmetic and a test of understanding representations of two-digit numbers. Groups did not differ on the arithmetic tests, but both groups of Welsh speakers read and compared (...) 2-digit numbers more accurately than monolingual English children. A similar study was carried out with Tamil/English bilingual children in England. The Tamil counting system is more transparent than English but less so than Welsh or Chinese. Tamil-speaking children performed better than monolingual English-speaking children on one of the standardized arithmetic tests but did not differ in their comparison of two-digit numbers. Reasons for the findings are discussed. (shrink)

The success of deep learning in natural language processing raises intriguing questions about the nature of linguistic meaning and ways in which it can be processed by natural and artificial systems. One such question has to do with subword segmentation algorithms widely employed in language modeling, machine translation, and other tasks since 2016. These algorithms often cut words into semantically opaque pieces, such as ‘period’, ‘on’, ‘t’, and ‘ist’ in ‘period|on|t|ist’. The system then represents the resulting segments in a dense (...) vector space, which is expected to model grammatical relations among them. This representation may in turn be used to map ‘period|on|t|ist’ (English) to ‘par|od|ont|iste’ (French). Thus, instead of being modeled at the lexical level, translation is reformulated more generally as the task of learning the best bilingual mapping between the sequences of subword segments of two languages; and sometimes even between pure character sequences: ‘p|e|r|i|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t’ → ‘p|a|r|o|d|o|n|t|i|s|t|e’. Such subword segmentations and alignments are at work in highly efficient end-to-end machine translation systems, despite their allegedly opaque nature. The computational value of such processes is unquestionable. But do they have any linguistic or philosophical plausibility? I attempt to cast light on this question by reviewing the relevant details of the subword segmentation algorithms and by relating them to important philosophical and linguistic debates, in the spirit of making artificial intelligence more transparent and explainable. (shrink)

On the surface, bi- and multilingualism would seem to be an ideal context for exploring questions of typological proximity. The obvious intuition is that the more closely related two languages are, the easier it should be to implement the two languages in one mind. This is the starting point adopted here, but we immediately run into the difficulty that the overwhelming majority of cognitive, computational, and linguistic research on bi- and multilingualism exhibits a monolingual bias (i.e., where monolingual grammars are (...) used as the standard of comparison for outputs from bilingual grammars). The primary questions so far have focused on how bilinguals balance and switch between their two languages, but our perspective on typology leads us to consider the nature of bi- and multi-lingual systems as a whole. Following an initial proposal from Hsin ( 2014 ), we conjecture that bilingual grammars are neither isolated, nor (completely) conjoined with one another in the bilingual mind, but rather exist as integrated source grammars that are further mitigated by a common, combined grammar (Cook, 2016 ; Goldrick et al., 2016a, b ; Putnam and Klosinski, 2017 ). Here we conceive such a combined grammar in a parallel, distributed, and gradient architecture implemented in a shared vector-space model that employs compression through routinization and dimensionality reduction. We discuss the emergence of such representations and their function in the minds of bilinguals. This architecture aims to be consistent with empirical results on bilingual cognition and memory representations in computational cognitive architectures. (shrink)

The definitive guide to 21st century investigations of multilingual neuroscience provides a comprehensive survey of neurocognitive investigations of multiple-language speakers. Prominent scholar John W. Schwieter offers a unique collection of works from globally recognized researchers in neuroscience, psycholinguistics, neurobiology, psychology, neuroimaging, and others, to provide a multidisciplinary overview of relevant topics. Authoritative coverage of state-of-the-art research provides readers with fundamental knowledge of significant theories and methods, language impairments and disorders, and neural representations, functions, and processes of the multilingual brain.Focusing on (...) up-to-date theoretical and experimental research, this timely handbook explores new directions of study and examines significant findings in the rapidly evolving field of multilingual neuroscience. Discussions on the bilingual advantage debate, recovery and rehabilitation patterns in multilingual aphasia, and the neurocognitive effects of multilingualism throughout the lifespan allow informed investigation of contemporary issues. Presents the first handbook-length examination of the neuroscience and neurolinguistics of multilingualism. Demonstrates how neuroscience and multilingualism intersect several areas of research, such as neurobiology and experimental psychology Includes works from prominent international scholars and researchers to provide global perspective Reflects cutting-edge research and promising areas of future study in the dynamic field of multilingual neuroscience. it is an invaluable resource for researchers and scholars in areas including multilingualism, psycholinguistics, second language acquisition, and cognitive science. This versatile work is also an indispensable addition to the classroom, providing advanced undergraduate and graduate students a thorough overview of the field. (shrink)

Rather than a simple transfer of words or texts from one language to another, on the model of the bilingual dictionary, translation has become understood as a translingual act of transcoding cultural material--a complex act of communication. Much recent work on translation in history grows out of interest in the effects of European colonialism, especially within Asian studies, where interest has been driven by the contrast between the experiences of China and Japan, which were never formally colonized, and the (...) alternative examples of peoples without strong, centralized states--those of the Indian subcontinent and the Tagalog in the Philippines--who were colonized by European powers. This essay reviews several books published in recent years, one group of which share the general interpretation that colonial powers forced their subjects to "translate" their local language, sociality, or culture into the terms of the dominant colonial power: because the colonial power controls representation and forces its subjects to use the colonial language, it is in a position to construct the forms of indigenous and subject identity. The other books under review here are less concerned with power in colonial situations than with the fact of different languages, cultures, or practices and the work of "translating" between the two--particularly the efforts of indigenous agents to introduce European ideas and institutions to their respective peoples. (shrink)

L'étude porte sur quelques-uns des cachets à empreintes trouvés dans une maison délienne détruite au Ier siècle av. J.-C. — Une série s'inspire de la statue archaïque d'Apollon délien : ces représentations permettent de préciser certains traits de la statue mais, en flanquant le dieu d'un échafaudage de figures annexes, soulèvent la question d'une éventuelle réfection hellénistique. — Un cachet bilingue phénicien-grec constitue la première mention, pour les Séleucides, d'un koinodikion ou tribunal mixte.

Children learning to read in two different orthographic systems are exposed to cross-linguistic interferences. We explored the effects of school and grade on phonological activation during a visual word recognition task. Elementary school children from Spain completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real words and pseudohomophones following Spanish or English phonological rules. Using the mouse-tracking paradigm, we analyzed errors, reaction times, and computer mouse movements. Children in the bilingual school performed better than children in the (...) monolingual school. Children in higher grades performed better than children in lower grades. The interference effect of Spanish phonology was weak and became weaker in higher grades. Spanish children differentiate between first and second language grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences since early on in the educational process. In 6th grade, children from the bilingual school responded better to words and Spanish pseudohomophones, while children from the monolingual school were less distracted by the English pseudohomophones. Children in the bilingual school had stronger inhibition of Spanish phonology and stronger activation of English phonology. Instructional method plays an important role on the processing strategies Spanish children rely on when reading in English. School and grade influence the link between orthographic and phonological representations. (shrink)

Introduction of deep neural networks to the machine translation research ameliorated conventional machine translation systems in multiple ways, specifically in terms of translation quality. The ability of deep neural networks to learn a sensible representation of words is one of the major reasons for this improvement. Despite machine translation using deep neural architecture is showing state-of-the-art results in translating European languages, we cannot directly apply these algorithms in Indian languages mainly because of two reasons: unavailability of the good corpus (...) and Indian languages are morphologically rich. In this paper, we propose a neural machine translation (NMT) system for four language pairs: English–Malayalam, English–Hindi, English–Tamil, and English–Punjabi. We also collected sentences from different sources and cleaned them to make four parallel corpora for each of the language pairs, and then used them to model the translation system. The encoder network in the NMT architecture was designed with long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (Bi-RNN). Evaluation of the obtained models was performed both automatically and manually. For automatic evaluation, the bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU) score was used, and for manual evaluation, three metrics such as adequacy, fluency, and overall ranking were used. Analysis of the results showed the presence of lengthy sentences in English–Malayalam, and the English–Hindi corpus affected the translation. Attention mechanism was employed with a view to addressing the problem of translating lengthy sentences (sentences contain more than 50 words), and the system was able to perceive long-term contexts in the sentences. (shrink)

In this study, we examined the word superiority effect in Arabic and English, two languages with significantly different morphological and writing systems. Thirty-two Arabic–English bilingual speakers performed a post-cued letter-in-string identification task in words, pseudo-words, and non-words. The results established the presence of the word superiority effect in Arabic and a robust effect of context in both languages. However, they revealed that, compared to the non-word context, word and pseudo-word contexts facilitated letter identification more in Arabic than in English. (...) In addition, the difference between word and pseudo-word contexts was smaller in Arabic compared to English. Finally, there was a consistent first-letter advantage in English regardless of the context, while this was more consistent only in the word and pseudo-word contexts in Arabic. We discuss these results in light of previous findings and argue that the differences between the patterns reported for Arabic and English are due to the qualitative difference between word morphophonological representations in the two languages. (shrink)

Variability is pervasive in spoken language, in particular if one is exposed to two varieties of the same language. Unlike in bilingual settings, standard and dialectal forms are often phonologically related, increasing the variability in word forms. We investigate whether dialectal variability in children’s input affects their ability to recognize words in Standard German, testing non-dialectal vs. dialectal children. Non-dialectal children, who typically grow up in urban areas, mostly hear Standard German forms, and hence encounter little segmental variability in (...) their input. Dialectal children in turn, who typically grow up in rural areas, hear both Standard German and dialectal forms, and are hence exposed to a large amount of variability in their input. We employ the familiar word paradigm for German children aged 12–18 months. Since dialectal children from rural areas are hard to recruit for laboratory studies, we programmed an App that allows all parents to test their children at home. Looking times to familiar vs. non-familiar words were analyzed using a semi-automatic procedure based on neural networks. Our results replicate the familiarity preference for non-dialectal German 12–18-month-old children. Non-dialectal children in the same age range, on the other hand, showed a novelty preference. One explanation for the novelty preference in dialectal children may be more mature linguistic processing, caused by more variability of word forms in the input. This linguistic maturation hypothesis is addressed in Experiment 2, in which we tested older children. These children, who are not exposed to dialectal forms, also showed a novelty preference. Taken together, our findings show that both dialectal and non-dialectal German children recognized the familiar Standard German word forms, but their looking pattern differed as a function of the variability in the input. Frequent exposure to both dialectal and Standard German word forms may hence have affected the nature of lexical representations, leading to more mature processing capacities. (shrink)

Cet article revient sur un corpus de conversations par SMS entre des personnes sourdes qui présentent un bilinguisme entre le français et la Langue des Signes Française. Ce regard rétrospectif sur ce corpus, notamment sur les motifs de son cadrage, l’enquête de terrain préalable à sa collecte, le protocole de collecte en tant que telle, ou le défi que constitue son annotation, permet de discuter des avantages et des limites des positionnements qualitatifs et quantitatifs en amont de la constitution du (...) corpus. Le contexte complexe des enjeux culturels, sociaux, économiques, historiques, identitaires, politiques, et épistémologiques, des sourds bilingues devient une ressource bien plus puissante s’il est envisagé à la fois comme le lieu de l’émergence des discours récoltés, et comme un giron potentiel de la problématisation du rapport entre l’analyste et son objet d’analyse. En décrivant les particularités linguistiques de ce corpus de conversations écrites entre personnes sourdes, cet article cherche à expliciter les écueils analytiques qui peuvent être anticipés ou évités par un travail exploratoire qualitatif tant en amont de la collecte des données et métadonnées, que lors du travail d’analyse. (shrink)

Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that these findings are compatible with a different account, in which bilinguals “carry over” the structure of their native language to the non-native language (...) during learning, and where there is no activation of translation equivalents. To demonstrate this, we describe a model in which language learning involves mapping native language phonological relationships to the non-native language, and we show how it can explain the results attributed to automatic activation of translation equivalents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bilingual Aesthetics:A New Sentimental EducationJane DuranBilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education, by Doris Sommer. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004, 254 pp.Doris Sommer's new work Bilingual Aesthetics is the sort of book that takes one by surprise—and for good reason. Filled with punning twists, and itself a valorizer of word games and magic, this work has not a lot to do with bilingualism (in the standard (...) sense), not a lot to do with aesthetics (again, in the standard academic sense), but a great deal to do with both. Whether the title is read (and Sommer's point is to forward the notion of alternate readings) as the aesthetics of bilingualism or as an account of what a bilingual might make of aesthetics, there is a startling amount of content in the work.Briefly, Sommer essays to make the case that our multicultural society is distinctly better off for being multicultural and multilingual (or at least, in some threatening sense, emergently bilingual) because the literal bilingual has a distinct advantage over her or his monolingual counterpart. The bilingual can play language games, and those games shock, amuse, or jolt—whatever it is that they do, they rouse us out of any state of intellectual torpor into which we might have fallen and they serve to make us all individuals who, in Du Bois' memorable phrase, have "double consciousness."Thus Sommer does in fact mean for her title to be read in at least two ways: Her work attempts to valorize and vindicate a sort of unofficial bilingualism (one of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition begins by saying "Knowing a second language entails some unease... "), while she also attempts to let us in on the notion that there is an aesthetic that develops from the use of more than one code. Sommer plays remarkably on all these concepts: She is familiar with the standard, overt scholarship on bilingualism—she can cite work by sociolinguists and others. At the same time, as an author known for previous work on literature, especially with regard to Latin America, she is also familiar with much of the standard historical work in aesthetics, including Kant. Citing thinkers such as Kenji Hakuta, William J. Bennett, Wittgenstein, and Elena Poniatowska, Sommer leaves the reader somewhat bedazzled and breathless but better off for having read her work.Her overall thesis, if one may attempt to employ such a phrase, is that bilingualism and code-switching create for us the same sort of uneasiness and inevitable access to the unconscious that works of art and literature produce—and that the edginess that is a concomitant of code-switching is beneficial. Her first chapter "Choose and Lose" reminds Americans that the United States has always been a multilingual place and focuses on how much can be gained from attempting to forward the notion. If there is any difficulty to Sommer's work, it is that she practices what she preaches. Every page demands much of the reader, since every page itself engages in the [End Page 121] sort of rapid-fire twisting and switching that Sommer is trying to support as the ground for a new aesthetic consciousness.Early on, Sommer gives us the following:Complaints about the danger to national coherence [of multi- or bilingualism] can be downright funny.... [One irate journalist wrote:] "How can immigrants identify with America if they can't read Lincoln's words in the language in which they were spoken?(out of many, one) to a multicultural boarding house,...?" No need to be upset at this harangue. It's obviously a joke, even if the author missed it (a common asymmetry in bilingual humor). Notice that the translation from Latin assumes that English-only citizens don't understand the very slogan they hold dear.(p. 26)But of course the joke is to some extent on Sommer and on all of us, as she no doubt intends. It is highly unlikely that the journalist did get the humor, and the only funny part of the entire tirade is that we—assuming we have enough formal education—may be able to make something out of it... (shrink)

To study the different mechanisms of understanding figurative language in a speaker’s native language and their second language, this study investigated how scientific metaphors in Chinese and English are electrophysiologically processed via event-related potential experimentation. Compared with the metaphors from daily life or in literary works, scientific metaphors tend to involve both a more complicated context structure and a distinct knowledge-inferencing process. During the N400 time window, English scientific metaphors elicited more negative N400s than Chinese ones at the parietal region. (...) In the late positive component time window, English scientific metaphors elicited less positive LPCs than Chinese ones at the parietal region, and larger late negativities encompassing smaller areas of the brain. The findings might indicate that for late unbalanced bilingual speakers, L2 scientific metaphor comprehension requires more effort in information retrieval or access to the non-literal route. Altogether, the possible findings are that non-native and non-dominant language processing involves decreased automaticity of cognitive mechanisms, and decreased sensitivity to the levels of conventionality of metaphoric meanings. (shrink)

Carruthers’ notion that natural language(s) might serve as the medium of non-domain-specific, propositionally based inferential thought is extended to the case of effortful retrieval of autobiographical memory among bilinguals. Specifically, the review suggests that the resources of bilingual inner speech might play a role in the cyclical activation of information from various informational domains during memory retrieval.

The current political debates in England highlight the role of language in citizenship, social exclusion, and discrimination. Similar debates can also be found around the world. Correspondingly, research addressing different language communities is burgeoning. Service providers and academics are increasingly employing bilingual community researchers or interpreters to carry out research. However, there is very little written about the effect of working with bilingual researchers. What it means to be bilingual is often essentialised and rarely problematised. Bilingual (...) researchers are seen as unproblematically acting as bridges between communities just because they are bilingual. Their ties to communities, their use of language, and their perspectives on the research are rarely investigated. Language is tied in an unproblematic way to meaning, values, and beliefs. In this article, I use examples from my own research to question what it means to be bilingual and to do cross-language research. I argue that there is no straightforward way in which meanings can be read off from researchers' ties to language and that being bilingual is not the same for everyone. (shrink)

Mesmo com avanços significativos referentes à inclusão das pessoas com deficiência, a comunidade surda ainda enfrenta diversos desafios. Em 2002, a LIBRAS foi reconhecida como meio de comunicação da comunidade surda e, em 2015, a Lei Brasileira de Inclusão garantiu acesso a todos os espaços, inclusive de saúde e a psicoterapia é um desses espaços. O objetivo geral desta pesquisa foi identificar as contribuições e os desafios da psicologia para a realização do atendimento psicoterapêutico acessível em LIBRAS. Os objetivos específicos (...) buscaram compreender a importância da atuação psicológica para surdos; investigar a inclusão da comunidade surda no acesso à saúde e à psicoterapia; identificar os locais que possuem psicoterapia bilíngue em LIBRAS na Bahia; e descrever os desafios e possibilidades da psicoterapia em LIBRAS. É uma pesquisa qualitativa, realizada através da revisão bibliográfica nas bases de dados SciELO, BVS e o acervo do GTPBS/ CRP - 03. Os principais resultados demonstraram que na Bahia existem dois locais que possuem psicólogos bilíngues em LIBRAS. A formação em LIBRAS, o conhecimento sobre a cultura surda e a compreensão da subjetividade da pessoa surda são necessários na formação da/o psicóloga/o que desejam atuar com este público. (shrink)

Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India. Edited by Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani with an introduction by Dominic Goodall. Collection Indologie, vol. 121. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry / École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2013. Pp. x + 466. Rs. 900, €38.

An important question in early bilingual first language acquisition concerns the development of lexical-semantic associations within and across two languages. The present study investigates the earliest emergence of lexical-semantic priming at 18 and 24 months in Spanish-English bilinguals (N= 32) and its relation to vocabulary knowledge within and across languages. Results indicate a remarkably similar pattern of development between monolingual and bilingual children, such that lexical-semantic development begins at 18 months and strengthens by 24 months. Further, measures of (...) cross-language lexical knowledge are stronger predictors of children’s lexical-semantic processing skill than measures that capture single-language knowledge only. This suggests that children make use of both languages when processing semantic information. Together these findings inform the understanding of the relation between lexical-semantic breadth and organization in the context of dual language learners in early development. (shrink)