Bimodal bilinguals, fluent in a signed and a spoken language, exhibit a unique form of bilingualism because their two languages access distinct sensory-motor systems for comprehension and production. When a bilingual’s languages are both spoken, the two languages compete for articulation (only one language can be spoken at a time), and both languages are perceived by the same perceptual system: audition. Differences between unimodal and bimodal bilinguals have implications for how the brain might be organized to control, process, and represent two languages. In this talk, I highlight recent results that illustrate what bimodal bilinguals can tell us about language processing and about the functional neural organization for language.

An extensive body of research claims that labels facilitate categorisation, highlight the commonalities between objects and act as invitations to form categories for young infants before their first birthday. While this may indeed be a reasonable claim, we argue that it is not justified by the experiments described in the research. We report on a series of experiments that demonstrate that labels can play a causal role in category formation during infancy. Ten-month-old infants were taught to group computer-displayed, novel cartoon drawings into two categories under tightly controlled experimental conditions. These findings demonstrate that even before infants start to produce their first words, the labels they hear can override the manner in which they categorise objects. Yet little is known regarding the nature of the mechanisms by which this effect is achieved. We further describe a neuro-computational model of infant visual categorisation, based on self-organising maps, that implements the unsupervised feature-based approach. The model successfully reproduces experiments demonstrating the impact of labelling on infant visual categorization reported in Plunkett et al. (2008). The results suggest that early in development, say before 12-months-old, labels need not act as invitations to form categories nor highlight the commonalities between objects, but may play a more mundane but nevertheless powerful role as additional features that are processed in the same fashion as other features that characterise objects and object categories.

Language-internal and –external processes in the formation of spatial prepositions in Papiamentu Papiamentu, a Romance-based creole, has a rich, established prepositional system in contrast to other creole languages (Kouwenburg & Murray, 1994). The great majority of these prepositions appear to be transparently derived from their Romance counterparts. However, I will examine two spatial prepositions—riba (>Sp., Port. arriba) and for di (>Port. fora de, Sp. fuera de)—which have semantically expanded to take on additional meanings not exhibited by their Romance counterparts. I will argue that these prepositions exhibit two different processes by showing language-internal processes at work in the expansion of riba and reviewing substratum influence (i.e. language-external) in the case of for di (Maurer, 2005). Finally, I highlight the need to examine lexemes individually as they ostensibly follow similar paths of grammaticalization. Creole languages in general offer a clear warning of attributing synchronic outcomes to one catch-all mechanism.

Bilingual aphasia, defined as a loss of one or both languages in bilingual individuals that results from left hemisphere damage, is of increasing interest worldwide because half the world’s population is bilingual. In the United States, the elderly Hispanic population is the fastest growing ethnic minority (Bureau of the Census, 2006). However, current research on bilingual aphasia cannot inform or recommend the optimal rehabilitation for bilingual aphasic patients (Roberts & Kiran, 2007). For instance, it is not known whether or not rehabilitating one of the patient's languages is sufficient, nor to what extent cross-language transfer occurs after rehabilitation. Several factors contribute to the paucity of research in this area: the multitude of possible language combinations in a bilingual individual, the relative age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency of the two languages of the bilingual individual, and the effect of focal brain damage on bilingual language representation. In this talk, I will focus on three broad issues, 1) what we understand about brain representation of two languages in normal and brain damaged bilingual individuals, 2) what we understand about the cognitive control of lexical access in bilingual aphasia through analysis of cross-language errors and 3) what we know about cross-language transfer subsequent to rehabilitation in one language. Using four experimental methodologies, fMRI, computational modeling, behavioral analysis of language production and single subject treatment designs, I will provide some insight into the complexities of bilingual aphasia rehabilitation and the various factors that contribute to cross-language transfer in these patients.

What factors affect the coding of two languages in one brain? For over 100 years, researchers have suggested that age of acquisition (when) vs. proficiency (how well) in a particular language play a role in its neural representation. Recent work in my laboratory has explored the influence of these two variables in bilingual language processing using fMRI. Studies have also extended this work by looking at these two factors in monolinguals and in motor skill processing in athletes. The similarities across these domains provide compelling evidence of the link between language and motor skill learning. They are also consistent with an emergentist view in which neural representations arise from a series of interactions at multiple levels. The implications of this conceptualization of language for clinicians and educators alike will be discussed.

What factors affect the coding of two languages in one brain? For over 100 years, researchers have suggested that age of acquisition (when) vs. proficiency (how well) in a particular language play a role in its neural representation. Recent work in my laboratory has explored the influence of these two variables in bilingual language processing using fMRI. Studies have also extended this work by looking at these two factors in monolinguals and in motor skill processing in athletes. The similarities across these domains provide compelling evidence of the link between language and motor skill learning. They are also consistent with an emergentist view in which neural representations arise from a series of interactions at multiple levels. The implications of this conceptualization of language for clinicians and educators alike will be discussed.

Theories of language production typically assume that at all levels of processing non-target representations associated with the target are partially activated. For example, at the lexical level, semantic associates are typically assumed to be activated (for target CAT, words like RAT, DOG, etc.) To cope with potential interference from these representations, theories typically incorporate selection mechanisms that serve to enhance target processing (e.g., boosting the activation of a node representing CAT). Over the past two decades, an extensive body of work (in both mono- and multilingual production) has shown that at the lexical level selection is not discrete. Although selection processes extensively enhance target activation, non-target representations (both within and across languages) remain partially active, influencing subsequent phonological processing (e.g., mixed semantic-phonological neighbors such as RAT facilitate phonological retrieval for target CAT).

In this talk, I'll review recent evidence that non-discreteness extends to phonological and phonetic processing. In monolinguals, gradient variation in the activation of phonological representations influences the phonetic realization of targets. In multilingual production, interaction between the speaker's sound systems at the phonetic level is modulated by gradient variation in the activation of phonological representations. I'll discuss the implications of these findings for phonological and phonetic processing in both mono- and multilingual production.

Despite a variety of logical and empirical problems, many researchers believe that language learning is limited by a critical period. The unified version of the Competition Model presents a way of accounting for age-related differences in language learning abilities that does not rely on critical periods, but instead on first language entrenchment, competition between multiple languages, and changing patterns of social integration into a new language community. The analysis has led to a variety of experiments designed to evaluate ways of improving L2 learning in adulthood.

Studies of both first and second language acquisition have largely focused on the acquisition of form over meaning. While comprehension studies indicate that language learners' understanding is not always adult- or target-like, surprisingly little is known about the nature of the differences, the details of children's and adult L2 learners' semantic systems once forms are in use, and when and what changes take place. In this talk I will present three studies exploring what child and adult language learners' gestures reveal about their verb meanings. The target domain is of that of placement (e.g., putting a cup on a table), which is lexicalized differently crosslinguistically. The first study shows how differences in placement verb meanings in Dutch and French are reflected in two distinct patterns of adult gesture use. The second study examines Dutch four- to five-year-old children's acquisition of placement verbs demonstrating that their placement gestures change systematically as their placement verb meanings develop. The last study illustrates different gesture patterns in adult Dutch learners of L2 French depending on influences of the L1 and different degrees of semantic reorganization. Together the studies support the notion that speech and gesture form an integrated system as revealed (a) in robust crosslinguistic differences in gestural practices parallel to differences in speech, and (b) in similar parallel differences across modalities in development. The integrated nature of the systems further means that gestures open a new window on details of semantic representations; and that they can shed light on the process of acquisition by revealing shifts in such representations.

Research on code-switching has progressed to the extent that there are now several competing models attempting to account for the patterns found in conversational data from bilinguals. One of the goals of our research programme at Bangor is to critically evaluate these competing models rather than to work within only one theoretical framework. The purpose of this talk is to defend the goal of critical evaluation in the face of the argument that two theories are never comparable, or what philosophers of science have called ‘incommensurability’. I seek to show in particular that the critical evaluation of two theories which at first sight appear not to be conducive to comparison can lead to new insights, including the redefinition of concepts and the generation of new hypotheses.

An example of incommensurability in theories of code-switching may be found by considering the different views held by Poplack and Myers-Scotton regarding the proper scope of a theory of code-switching (see e.g. Poplack & Meechan, 1998, Myers-Scotton, 2002) vs borrowing. Here the problem of incommensurability arises because the notion of linguistic integration is key to the definition of borrowing for Poplack, while it is at best a hypothesis about borrowing for Myers-Scotton. We attempt a solution to this problem by critically examining the notion of linguistic integration in order to determine whether a clear line can be drawn between integrated and unintegrated donor-language items. The data we have used for this are English-origin verbs in data collected from Welsh-English bilingual speakers who speak mainly Welsh. We have subjected these to three tests of linguistic integration to see whether a clearcut distinction can be drawn between switches and borrowings. We show that the three tests have different results, and that the notion of a continuum between switches and borrowings is more defensible. Finally, we propose a new hypothesis to be examined in relation to the data, that the linguistic integration of donor-language items will be related to their frequency.

One of the interesting phenomena in language is that one word (or phrase) can introduce a syntactic commitment for the occurrence of a word or phrase with particular syntactic characteristics which can occur much later in the sentence. WH-phrases are one of the most studied of these dependencies. These are particularly interesting because the commitment is for a missing element (trace or gap). That is the WH-phrase Which boy in Which boy did John tell Susan that he went to the movies with ___ yesterday? has to be paired with an unfilled NP position like that following with; note that without the WH-phrase this sentence would be ungrammatical in most varieties of English. Research using ERPs has shown that WH-phrases introduce a memory load which is carried until the commitment is filled and that there are also effects at the point at which the gap is located which are modulated by the distance over which integration with the WH-phrase must extend. There are a number of interesting issues about the processing of long-distance dependencies. First, it has not been clear whether there are specific processing routines for WH-dependencies, or if similar effects can be found for other types of syntactic commitments. I will discuss an experiment that involves the processing of the particle zai in Chinese, which introduces a commitment for a locative postposition. Compared to sentences with no specific commitment (copula constructions), these sentences show a sustained negativity similar to that found for WH-sentences. There are also signs of costs of integration across distance which are similar to those found in WH-constructions. This suggests that these processes are not specific to gap location and filling, but reflect more general processes regarding maintaining and resolving commitments. A second issue has to do with the extent to which the processing effects described above should be considered to be those of syntactic commitment and resolution or of semantic commitment and integration. This can be addressed manipulating the degree of semantic commitment that is embodied in the word or phrase which introduces the long distance commitment. For example, Chinese classifiers are similar to grammatical gender systems in that they introduce a commitment for a particular type of head noun, but it appears to be much more semantic in nature than the syntactic commitment introduced by grammatical gender. Nevertheless distance to the point of integration induces a positivity which is similar to that found for the zai construction, in which the semantic constraint is considerably less detailed. The primary difference is that the effect is much larger for the classifier commitments. Likewise, manipulating the degree of semantic constraint of a WH phrase modulates the size of the maintenance effect over intervening material. These results suggest that the semantic aspect of the commitment may be as important as the syntactic aspects in the brain processes which are reflected in these two ERP effects.

Bilingual chlidren, as well as older adults, exhibit advantages over their monolingul peers in tasks that rely on executive control. However, until recently, studies comparing bilingual and monolingual college students found mixed results, and a less consistent bilingual advantage. Most studies examining this population have used tasks that rely on spatial visual attention, such as variations of the Simon task, the ANT task and the anti-saccade task. In this talk, I will describe a new study that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual college students on three executive control tasks, and investigated possible bilingual advantages beyond the domain of spatial attention. Possible implications of the results for the locus of the bilingual executive advantage will be explored.

Words provide the central interface between form and meaning during language comprehension. Describing the nature of form-meaning interactions at the level of individual words is therefore one of the major goals of contemporary research on language comprehension. Part of that general endeavor involves describing exactly when semantic information becomes available during visual word recognition, and the nature of the form-level processing that is necessary for that to occur. I'd like to present some elements of response to these specific questions as well as address the question of the interrelation of the two languages of language learners at the word level. I will present a study using event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of visual word recognition in second language learners using a masked repetition priming paradigm as well as other data from bilingual studies run in our lab that may shed light on these topics.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show an uneven profile within the area of morphosyntax. For example, in English, the use of tense/agreement morphemes stands out as an area of special weakness. In Swedish, both word order and the use of tense can be problematic. These weaknesses are resolved only gradually. Thus far, the theoretical frameworks that might account for the findings constitute only partial solutions. Some provide a very insightful description of the difficulty but do not explain the systematic, incremental changes seen over time; others provide a plausible account of the gradual change but lack the precision necessary to explain the differences across languages. An alternative view that incorporates the empirically supported claims of the previous approaches will be offered. The alternative assumes that many of the characteristics of the SLI profile, including crosslinguistic differences in the profile, can be traced to details in the input, and that children's ability to interpret successively larger grammatical units in input sentences can lead to the gradual, incremental changes seen in the children's morphosyntactic use. Observations supporting these assumptions will be provided, and their theoretical as well as clinical implications will be discussed.

Speech communication involves a chain of events that ideally aligns mental representations in the talker with those in the listener. Links in the chain can be "broken" at many points, particularly in cases where the talker and listener approach each other with non-optimally aligned linguistic sound systems (e.g. when they do not come from the same native language background) or when the listener's access to the speech signal may be blocked by a hearing impairment or the presence of background noise. I will present a series of studies that aimed to understand how talkers and listeners repair these breakdowns in order to achieve talker-listener alignment. The first study examined talker adaptation to the listener. Specifically, we conducted a series of acoustic-phonetic comparisons of "clear speech" across languages with various phonological structures. A second study focused on the other side of the talker-listener channel by examining listener adaptation to the talker. In particular, we investigated listener adaptation to foreign-accented speech. Both of these studies examined talker-listener adaptation under laboratory conditions in which the talker and listener did not interact directly. A third study examined talker-listener interactions under more natural conditions of spontaneous, dialogue recordings. In this study we examined communicative efficiency and phonetic convergence in English conversations between pairs of native English talkers and in conversations between one native and one non-native talker of English. Together, these studies build a picture of speech communication as a bidirectional process of talker-listener alignment even in the case of communication between interlocutors who do not share a "mother tongue."

Dr. Trueswell will present a series of eye tracking experiments that explore how visual-spatial attention is allocated during the perception of simple and complex events. Eye movements were recorded during a variety ofdifferent tasks, including event description, passive viewing, and thecomprehension of novel verbs (e.g., "Oh look! Mooping!"). The results show that there is a tight temporal (and sometimes causal) relationship between the allocation of visual-spatial attention and the rapid linguistic choices speakers make when describing events (linguistic choices that include Subject/Object assignment and manner vs. path description). Dr. Trueswell also shows that children as young as three years of age are sensitive to the characteristics of these speakers’ eye gaze patterns, and use them in conjunction with linguistic evidence to infer verb meaning.