Cross-Language Transfer and Attentional Control in Early Bilingual Speech

Purpose: This study investigated the roles of cross-language transfer of first language (L1) and attentional control in second-language (L2) speech perception and production of sequential bilinguals, taking phonological overlap into account. Method: Twenty-five monolingual Dutch-speaking and 25 sequential bilingual Turkish–Dutch-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds were tested using picture identification tasks for speech perception in L1 Turkish and L2 Dutch, single-word tasks for speech production in L1 and L2, and a visual search task for attentional control. Phonological overlap was manipulated by dividing the speech tasks into subsets of phonemes that were either shared or unshared between languages. Results: In Dutch speech perception and production, monolingual children obtained higher accuracies than bilingual peers. Bilinguals showed equal performance in L1 and L2 perception but scored higher on L1 than on L2 production. For speech perception of shared phonemes, linear regression analyses revealed no direct effects of attention and L1 on L2. For speech production of shared phonemes, attention and L1 directly affected L2. When exploring unshared phonemes, direct effects of attentional control on L2 were demonstrated not only for speech production but also for speech perception. Conclusions: The roles of attentional control and cross-language transfer on L2 speech are different for shared and unshared phonemes. Whereas L2 speech production of shared phonemes is also supported by cross-language transfer of L1, L2 speech perception and production of unshared phonemes benefit from attentional control only. This underscores the clinical importance of considering phonological overlap and supporting attentional control when assisting young sequential bilinguals' L2 development.

Representation across languages: biographical sociology meets translation and interpretation studies

Biographical approaches are increasingly being used with people who speak and write a range of languages. Even when an account is originally spoken, the final version usually ends up written in the language used by the majority of the population. Researchers have shown that adopting a language that is not the one an account was given in may change how someone is perceived. Yet little has been written by sociologists using biographical approaches about the implications of moving accounts across languages. Researchers within translation and interpretation studies are increasingly tackling issues of representation across languages and developing concepts that can usefully be applied in biographical research. They question the assumption that accounts can be unproblematically transferred across languages and argue for strategies and concepts that “foreignise” texts and challenge the baseline of the target, usually for these writers, English language. However, these concepts bring issues of their own. In this article I examine these developments and give an example from my own cross language research that show that these concepts can begin to open up debates about meaning and representation.

Psychometric Properties of the English–Spanish Vocabulary Inventory in Toddlers With and Without Early Language Delay

Purpose: Despite the increasing population of dual language learners (DLLs) in the United States, vocabulary measures for young DLLs have largely relied on instruments developed for monolinguals. The multistudy project reports on the psychometric properties of the English–Spanish Vocabulary Inventory (ESVI), which was designed to capture unique cross-language measures of lexical knowledge that are critical for assessing DLLs' vocabulary, including translation equivalents (whether the child knows the words for the same concept in each language), total vocabulary (the number of words known across both languages), and conceptual vocabulary (the number of words known that represent unique concepts in either language). Method: Three studies included 87 Spanish–English DLLs ( M age = 26.58 months, SD = 2.86 months) with and without language delay from two geographic regions. Multiple measures (e.g., caregiver report, observation, behavioral tasks, and standardized assessments) determined content validity, construct validity, social validity, and criterion validity of the ESVI. Results: Monolingual instruments used in bilingual contexts significantly undercounted lexical knowledge as measured on the ESVI. Scores on the ESVI were related to performance on other measures of communication, indicating acceptable content, construct, and criterion validity. Social validity ratings were similarly positive. ESVI scores were also associated with suspected language delay. Conclusions: These studies provide initial evidence of the adequacy of the ESVI for use in research and clinical contexts with young children learning English and Spanish (with or without a language delay). Developing tools such as the ESVI promotes culturally and linguistically responsive practices that support accurate assessment of DLLs' lexical development. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.17704391

O nowych ręcznie zrównoleglonych i znakowanych dwujęzycznych korpusach równoległych oraz ich zastosowaniach

On New Manually Aligned and Tagged Bilingual Parallel Corpora and Their ApplicationsThis article is devoted to the manually aligned and tagged bilingual parallel CLARIN-PL-BIZ corpora of the Baltic and Slavic languages which are currently being developed. The study discusses the essential features of these corpora that make their applications go far beyond typical corpus analysis. Applications of these corpora include the design of cross-language models for the development of machine translation and artificial intelligence. The article also draws attention to the high potential of these resources as a model training base for testing natural language processing tools. O nowych ręcznie zrównoleglonych i znakowanych dwujęzycznych korpusach równoległych oraz ich zastosowaniachW artykule autor opisuje obecnie powstające ręcznie zrównoleglone i znakowane dwujęzyczne korpusy równoległe CLARIN-PL-BIZ języków bałtyckich i słowiańskich. Omawia wyróżniające cechy tych korpusów, które sprawią, że zastosowania tych korpusów znacznie wykroczą poza typowe analizy korpusowe. Wśród zastosowań tych korpusów autor wymienia definiowanie modeli międzyjęzykowych na rzecz rozwoju przekładu maszynowego i rozwoju sztucznej inteligencji. Zwraca również uwagę na wysoki potencjał tych zasobów jako wzorcowej bazy treningowej do testowania narzędzi przetwarzania języka naturalnego.

Digital Mining Algorithm of English Translation Course Information Based on Digital Twin Technology

Cross-language communication puts forward higher requirements for information mining in English translation course. Aiming at the problem that the frequent patterns in the current digital mining algorithms produce a large number of patterns and rules, with a long execution time, this paper proposes a digital mining algorithm for English translation course information based on digital twin technology. According to the results of word segmentation and tagging, the feature words of English translation text are extracted, and the cross-language mapping of text is established by using digital twin technology. The estimated probability of text translation is maximized by corresponding relationship. The text information is transformed into text vector, the semantic similarity of text is calculated, and the degree of translation matching is judged. Based on this data dimension, the frequent sequence is constructed by transforming suffix sequence into prefix sequence, and the digital mining algorithm is designed. The results of example analysis show that the execution time of digital mining algorithm based on digital twin technology is significantly shorter than that based on Apriori and Map Reduce, and the mining accuracy rate reached more than 80%, which has good performance in processing massive data.

Double-Sided Transformations of Culture-Bound Constituents in William Saroyan’s Cross-Cultural Domain

The article focuses on the transformations, which occur in Russian and Armenian translations of culture-bound constituents in W. Saroyan’s fiction with special reference to the analysis of their pragmatic value and both cross-cultural and cross-language identification. The aim of the analysis is to reveal the so-called Saroyanesque identity and the translation perspectives of his specific manner of reproducing the actual reality, his personal vision of the world he lived in and created in, the world which combined the environment, circumstances, conditions, characters, cultures, ethnicity of two different communities – his native Armenian and no less native America. The so-called double-sided transformations of culture-bound constituents occur in W. Saroyan’s fiction at basically two levels: the cognitive level of ethnic and mental indicators transformations and the linguistic level of culture-bound elements translation (words, phrases, exclamations etc.). To keep Saroyanesque identity the translators should primarily transform the ideas, the concepts, the ethnic mentality of the characters, then the language media should undergo certain pragmatic modification to be correctly interpreted by the target audience.