Processing of contrastiveness by heritage Russian bilinguals

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian–English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective–noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju položite zvezdočku . . . “Red put star . . .” whose inherent contrastiveness results from integration of multiple sources of information, i.e., word order, prosody and visual context. The results showed that while monolinguals rapidly used word order and visual context (but not contrastive prosody) to compute the contrast set even before the noun appeared in speech, heritage Russian bilinguals were very slow and took notice of multiple sources of information only when the lexical identity of the noun made the task superfluous. These results are similar to slowed processing reported in the literature for L2 learners. It is hypothesized that this slowdown in HL processing is due to cascading effects of covert competition between the two languages that starts at the level of spoken word recognition and culminates at the interfaces and, with time, it may become a major contributing force to heritage language attrition.

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The 34th Sir Frederick Bartlett Lecture: The abstract representations in speech processing

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1080/13803390802218542 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 61 (11) ◽

pp. 1601-1619 ◽

Cited By ~ 16

Author(s):

Anne Cutler

Keyword(s):

Speech Processing ◽

Spoken Word Recognition ◽

Spoken Word ◽

Sources Of Information ◽

Lexical Representations ◽

Abstract Representations ◽

Phonological Form ◽

The Difference ◽

Metalinguistic Knowledge

Speech processing by human listeners derives meaning from acoustic input via intermediate steps involving abstract representations of what has been heard. Recent results from several lines of research are here brought together to shed light on the nature and role of these representations. In spoken-word recognition, representations of phonological form and of conceptual content are dissociable. This follows from the independence of patterns of priming for a word's form and its meaning. The nature of the phonological-form representations is determined not only by acoustic-phonetic input but also by other sources of information, including metalinguistic knowledge. This follows from evidence that listeners can store two forms as different without showing any evidence of being able to detect the difference in question when they listen to speech. The lexical representations are in turn separate from prelexical representations, which are also abstract in nature. This follows from evidence that perceptual learning about speaker-specific phoneme realization, induced on the basis of a few words, generalizes across the whole lexicon to inform the recognition of all words containing the same phoneme. The efficiency of human speech processing has its basis in the rapid execution of operations over abstract representations.

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Visual attention and quantifier-spreading in heritage Russian bilinguals

Second language Research ◽

10.1177/0267658314537292 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 31 (1) ◽

pp. 75-104 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Irina A Sekerina ◽

Antje Sauermann

Keyword(s):

Eye Movements ◽

Language Acquisition ◽

Visual Attention ◽

Language Learners ◽

Heritage Language ◽

Second Language Learners ◽

Visual Context ◽

Verification Task ◽

Universal Quantifier ◽

Sources Of Information

It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.

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