Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-14T05:19:04.508Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Vocabulary size and native speaker self-identification influence flexibility in linguistic prediction among adult bilinguals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2018

RYAN E. PETERS ,
THERES GRÜTER  and
ARIELLE BOROVSKY
RYAN E. PETERS*
Affiliation:
Purdue University
THERES GRÜTER
Affiliation:
University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
ARIELLE BOROVSKY
Affiliation:
Purdue University
*
*ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

When language users predict upcoming speech, they generate pluralistic expectations, weighted by likelihood (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016). Many variables influence the prediction of highly likely sentential outcomes, but less is known regarding variables affecting the prediction of less-likely outcomes. Here we explore how English vocabulary size and self-identification as a native speaker (NS) of English modulate adult bi-/multilinguals’ preactivation of less-likely sentential outcomes in two visual-world experiments. Participants heard transitive sentences containing an agent, action, and theme (The pirate chases the ship) while viewing four referents varying in expectancy by relation to the agent and action. In Experiment 1 (N=70), spoken themes referred to highly expected items (e.g., ship). Results indicate lower skill (smaller vocabulary size) and less confident (not identifying as NS) bi-/multilinguals activate less-likely action-related referents more than their higher skill/confidence peers. In Experiment 2 (N=65), themes were one of two less-likely items (The pirate chases the bone/cat). Results approaching significance indicate an opposite but similar size effect: higher skill/confidence listeners activate less-likely action-related (e.g., bone) referents slightly more than lower skill/confidence listeners. Results across experiments suggest higher skill/confidence participants more flexibly modulate their linguistic predictions per the demands of the task, with similar but not identical patterns emerging when bi-/multilinguals are grouped by self-ascribed NS status versus vocabulary size.

Keywords

bilingualismeye trackinglocal coherencepredictionsentence comprehension
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 39 , Issue 6 , November 2018 , pp. 1439 - 1469
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Arai, M., Van Gompel, R. P., & Scheepers, C. (2007). Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 54, 218–250.Google Scholar
Bates, D., Maechler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67, 1–48.Google Scholar
Bialystok, E., & Luk, G. (2012). Receptive vocabulary differences in monolingual and bilingual adults. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 15, 397–401.Google Scholar
Borovsky, A., Burns, E., Elman, J. L., & Evans, J. L. (2013). Lexical activation during sentence comprehension in adolescents with history of specific language impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders, 46, 413–427.Google Scholar
Borovsky, A., Elman, J. L., & Fernald, A. (2012). Knowing a lot for one’s age: Vocabulary skill and not age is associated with anticipatory incremental sentence interpretation in children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 112, 417–436.Google Scholar
Borovsky, A., Sweeney, K., Elman, J. L., & Fernald, A. (2014). Real-time interpretation of novel events across childhood. Journal of Memory and Language, 73, 1–14.Google Scholar
Chambers, C. G., & Cooke, H. (2009). Lexical competition during second-language listening: Sentence context, but not proficiency, constrains interference from the native lexicon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 1029.Google Scholar
Cook, V. (1999). Going beyond the native speaker in language teaching. TESOL Quarterly, 33, 185–209.Google Scholar
Cunnings, I. (2016). Parsing and working memory in bilingual sentence processing. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 259–278.Google Scholar
Davies, A. (1991). The native speaker in applied linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Davies, A. (2003). The native speaker: Myth and reality, Vol. 38. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Davies, A. (2013). Native speakers and native users: Loss and gain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Dijkgraaf, A., Hartsuiker, R., & Duyck, W. (2016). Predicting upcoming information in native-language and non-native-language auditory word recognition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 917–930.Google Scholar
Dunn, D. M., & Dunn, L. M. (2007). ). Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test: Manual . Boston: Pearson.Google Scholar
Dussias, P. E., Kroff, J. R. V., Tamargo, R. E. G., & Gerfen, C. (2013). When gender and looking go hand in hand. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 353–387.Google Scholar
Fernald, A., Perfors, A., & Marchman, V. A. (2006). Picking up speed in understanding: Speech processing efficiency and vocabulary growth across the 2nd year. Developmental Psychology, 42, 98.Google Scholar
Grüter, T. (2017). Vocabulary does not equal language, but neither does morphosyntax. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 20, 17–18.Google Scholar
Grüter, T., Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2012). Grammatical gender in L2: A production or a real-time processing problem? Second Language Research, 28, 191–215.Google Scholar
Hintz, F., Meyer, A. S., & Huettig, F. (2017). Predictors of verb-mediated anticipatory eye movements in the visual world. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43, 1352.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2013). Grammatical gender in adult L2 acquisition: Relations between lexical and syntactic variability. Second Language Research, 29, 33–56.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2015). Semantics and morphosyntax in L2 predictive sentence processing. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 53, 277–306.Google Scholar
Hopp, H. (2016). Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 32, 277–307.Google Scholar
Jaeger, B. C. (2017). r2glmm: Computes R squared for mixed (multilevel) models. R package version 0.1.2. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=r2glmm.Google Scholar
Jaeger, B. C., Edwards, L. J., Das, K., & Sen, P. K. (2017). An R 2 statistic for fixed effects in the generalized linear mixed model. Journal of Applied Statistics, 44, 1086–1105.Google Scholar
Kaan, E. (2014). Predictive sentence processing in L2 and L1: What is different? Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 4, 257–282.Google Scholar
Kaan, E., Ballantyne, J. C., & Wijnen, F. (2015). Effects of reading speed on second-language sentence processing. Applied Psycholinguistics, 36, 799–830.Google Scholar
Kail, R. V., & Salthouse, T. A. (1994). Processing speed as a mental capacity. Acta Psychologica, 86, 199–225.Google Scholar
Kharkhurin, A. V. (2012). A preliminary version of an internet-based picture naming test. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 1, 34–41 doi: 10.4236/ojml.2012.21005.Google Scholar
Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. (2007). Lexical and referential influences on on-line spoken language comprehension: A comparison of adults and primary-school-age children. First Language, 27, 29–52.Google Scholar
Kilborn, K. (1992). On-line integration of grammatical information in a second language. Advances in Psychology, 83, 337–350.Google Scholar
Knoeferle, P., & Kreysa, H. (2012). Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 2.Google Scholar
Kukona, A., Fang, S. Y., Aicher, K. A., Chen, H., & Magnuson, J. S. (2011). The time course of anticipatory constraint integration. Cognition, 119, 23–42.Google Scholar
Kuperberg, G. R., & Jaeger, T. F. (2016). What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31, 32–59.Google Scholar
Kuznetsova, A., Brockhoff, P. B., & Christensen, R. H. B. (2016. lmerTest: Tests in linear mixed effects models. R package version 2.0-32. Retrieved from https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lmerTest.Google Scholar
Leal, T., Slabakova, R., & Farmer, T. A. (2017). The fine-tuning of linguistic expectations over the course of L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 39, 493–525.Google Scholar
Lew-Williams, C., & Fernald, A. (2010). Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language, 63, 447–464.Google Scholar
Mani, N., & Huettig, F. (2012). Prediction during language processing is a piece of cake—But only for skilled producers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38, 843.Google Scholar
Marian, V., Blumenfeld, H. K., & Kaushanskaya, M. (2007). The Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (LEAP-Q): Assessing language profiles in bilinguals and multilinguals. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 50, 940–967.Google Scholar
McClelland, J. L., & Elman, J. L. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 1–86.Google Scholar
Mitsugi, S., & MacWhinney, B. (2016). The use of case marking for predictive processing in second language Japanese. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19, 19–35.Google Scholar
Norris, J. M. (2015). Statistical significance testing in second language research: Basic problems and suggestions for reform. Language Learning, 65 (Suppl. 1): 97–126.Google Scholar
Nozari, N., Trueswell, J. C., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2016). The interplay of local attraction, context and domain-general cognitive control in activation and suppression of semantic distractors during sentence comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1942–1953.Google Scholar
Rampton, M. B. H. (1990). Displacing the “native speaker”: Expertise, affiliation, and inheritance. ELT Journal, 44, 97–101.Google Scholar
Core Team, R (2016). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Retrieved from https://www.R-project.org/.Google Scholar
Sekerina, I. A., Campanelli, L., & Van Dyke, J. A. (2016). Using the visual world paradigm to study retrieval interference in spoken language comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 873.Google Scholar
Snedeker, J., & Trueswell, J. C. (2004). The developing constraints on parsing decisions: The role of lexical-biases and referential scenes in child and adult sentence processing. Cognitive Psychology, 49, 238–299.Google Scholar
Tabor, W., Galantucci, B., & Richardson, D. (2004). Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 355–370.Google Scholar
Tanenhaus, M. K., Spivey-Knowlton, M. J., Eberhard, K. M., & Sedivy, J. C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632.Google Scholar
Troyer, M., & Borovsky, A. (2017). Maternal socioeconomic status influences the range of expectations during language comprehension in adulthood. Cognitive Science, 41 (Suppl. 6): 1405–1433.Google Scholar
Van Dyke, J. A., & Johns, C. L. (2012). Memory interference as a determinant of language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 6, 193–211.Google Scholar
Van Dyke, J. A., & McElree, B. (2006). Retrieval interference in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 157–166.Google Scholar
Van Dyke, J. A., & McElree, B. (2011). Cue-dependent interference in comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 65, 247–263.Google Scholar
Woodard, K., Pozzan, L., & Trueswell, J. C. (2016). Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 141, 187–209.Google Scholar