33.484, Review: Cognitive Science; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics: Fernandez, Katsika, Azpiroz, Allen (2021)
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Subject: 33.484, Review: Cognitive Science; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics: Fernandez, Katsika, Azpiroz, Allen (2021)
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Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2022 21:26:14
From: Sviatlana Karpava [karpava.sviatlana at ucy.ac.cy]
Subject: Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2656.html
EDITOR: Leigh Fernandez
EDITOR: Kalliopi Katsika
EDITOR: Maialen Iraola Azpiroz
EDITOR: Shanley E.M. Allen
TITLE: Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual Adults and Children
SERIES TITLE: Benjamins Current Topics 117
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2021
REVIEWER: Sviatlana Karpava
SUMMARY
“Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in Bilingual
Adults and Children”, edited by Leigh Fernandez, Kalliopi Katsika, Maialen
Iraola Azpiroz and Shanley E.M. Allen, provides insights into the relationship
between production and comprehension in bilingual adults and children, as well
as the cognitive and linguistic mechanisms underlying these processes, with a
focus on morphology, semantics, phonology, syntax-discourse and morphosyntax
interfaces. The book is a collection of 10 chapters that investigate
children’s and adults’ bilingual language acquisition based on original
empirical data from comprehension and production studies, both longitudinal
and cross-sectional, and online and offline, by examining a variety of
linguistic phenomena in diverse language combinations.
In Chapter 1, ‘Psycholinguistic Approaches to Production and Comprehension in
Bilingual Adults and Children’, Maialen Iraola Azpiroz, Shanley E.M. Allen,
Kalliopi Katsika and Leigh Fernandez present an overview of the book, and
explain its main aims and objectives; in particular, the authors provide an
in-depth investigation of the interaction between language production and
comprehension based on recent theoretical models and empirical evidence
(Serratrice & Allen, 2015; Gambi & Pickering, 2017). This introductory chapter
describes the variety of language pairs, constructions and methods, and the
discussion and interpretation of the results regarding (a) symmetries in
comprehension and production that can be found in the subsequent chapters of
the book.
In Chapter 2, ‘Processing Strategies used by Basque-French Bilingual and
Basque Monolingual Children for the Production of the Subject-Agent in
Basque’, Isabelle Duguine and Barbara Köpke present the results of their
longitudinal study, which examined the strategies used by 2L1 and L2
Basque-French bilingual children and monolingual Basque children to express
the subject-agent function in a free elicitation context in Basque; in
particular, the use of transitive constructions that require a subject-agent
noun marked for the ergative case. The analysis of the data revealed that the
topological strategy, particularly the marking of the subject-agent in the
first position via subject-verb-object word order, was the preferred option
for the majority of the bilingual children. Nonetheless, it was observed that
the L1 Basque children tended to use the morphological strategy more often;
specifically, the use of the nominal ergative suffix. The findings are
interpreted in the light of the cue cost and cue validity and the application
of the Competition Model in language production (Bates & MacWhinney, 1987;
Kail, 2012).
In Chapter 3, ‘Bilingual Language Control across Modalities’, Esli Struys,
Jill Surmont, Piet van de Craen, Olga Kepinska and Maurits van den Noort
explore the relationship between language control in mixed-language
comprehension and production. The participants in their experimental study
were Dutch-French bilingual adults who were asked to complete two tasks
pertaining to bilingual language control in both modalities, namely a
mixed-language semantic categorisation task and a mixed-language verbal
fluency task, which measured control processes during language comprehension
and language production, respectively. The correlational analyses revealed
significant switch costs in response times in the first task, which is in line
with the previous research on mixed-language comprehension (Macizo et al.,
2012; Reynolds et al., 2016). Furthermore, the analysis of the data showed
that there were significant mixing costs in the second task, which confirms
previous studies of mixed-language production (Woumans et al., 2015). Overall,
the findings suggest that monitoring processes are involved in bilingual
language control across modalities, which are affected by the direction of the
language switch.
Chapter 4, ‘Bilingual Reference Production: A Cognitive-computational Account’
by Jacopo Torregrossa, Christiane Bongartz and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli,
elaborates on the production of reference in discourse by bilingual children
with regard to the activation of a referent. The authors reported on the
correlation between activation and lexical processing amongst bilinguals based
on the data analysis obtained via narrative elicitation and lexical decision
tasks (Schneider et al., 2005; Protopapas et al., 2012). The comparison of
narratives produced by German-Greek bilinguals and their monolingual peers
regarding the distribution of referential expressions revealed that
monolingual pronouns had a higher activation rate than did bilingual ones;
thus, bilingual performance was affected by the speed of lexical retrieval.
The researchers took different activation-lending factors and their respective
weights into consideration to show that reference production was affected by
individual variations and relevant cognitive mechanisms (Andreou et al.,
2015).
In Chapter 5, ‘Investigating Vulnerabilities in Grammatical Processing of
Bilinguals: Insights from Basque-Spanish Adults and Children’, Marie Pourquié,
Hugues Lacroix and Natalia Kartushina discuss the results of their
experimental study of the comprehension and production of verb agreement and
grammatical processing in bilinguals. Two groups of participants took part in
the research, namely children and adults who were balanced Basque-Spanish
bilinguals and age-matched Spanish-dominant Basque-Spanish bilinguals. The
first group was assessed on the comprehension and production of subject-verb
agreement in Basque and Spanish, and object-verb agreement in Basque. The
second group was only assessed in Spanish. The analysis of the data showed
that there was a difference between comprehension and production in Basque,
both in the case of adults and of children, with higher scores for
comprehension. In Spanish, a gap between production and performance was only
found in the case of children, with better performance in production. It was
found that age and morphological complexity, but not the amount of language
exposure, affected bilingual people’s grammatical processing. The results were
in line with the previous research (Gibson et al., 2012; Yan & Nicoladis,
2009), but were not consistent with the language exposure hypothesis (Keller
et al., 2015).
The objective of Chapter 6, ‘Dominance, Mode, and Individual Variation in
Bilingual Speech Production and Perception’ by Page Piccinini and Amalia
Arvaniti, was to emphasise the importance of considering such factors as
language dominance, individual variation, task and modality effects in
research on bilinguals. In their study, the authors examined the production
and perception of negative, short-lag and long-lag Voice Onset Times (VOTs) by
early Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. English and Spanish
differ in terms of the phonological realisations of stops and VOT types
(Dmitrieva et al., 2015; Abramson & Whaken, 2017). In Spanish, negative and
short-lag VOT stops are distinct phonemes, while they are realisations of
voiced stops in English. The analysis of the data showed that language
dominance affected bilinguals’ production, as English-dominant bilinguals
scored higher on short-lag VOT stops in response to negative VOT in comparison
to balanced bilinguals, but lower for negative and short-lag VOTs. There was a
correlation between the production and performance of the bilinguals and their
individual variations. The performance of bilinguals and monolinguals was
comparable, although the control group produced fewer VOT tokens and shorter
short-lag VOTs in response to negative VOTs.
In Chapter 7, ‘Child Heritage Speaker’s Production and Comprehension of Direct
Object Clitic Gender in Spanish’, Naomi Shin, Barbara Rodriguez, Aja Armijo
and Molly Perara-Lunde present the results of their experimental study of the
production and comprehension of direct object (DO) clitics in Spanish by child
heritage speakers. The analysis of the data obtained via a production task
revealed that lexical knowledge of Spanish affected the children’s overt and
covert representations of DO expressions, whereas a better knowledge of
English vocabulary led to an increase in gender mismatch errors. The
comprehension task indicated that bilingual children did not use clitic gender
to identify referents. This could have been due to the fact that the DO clitic
gender, which has a disambiguation function, is infrequent in discourse and
may take some time to acquire. According to the researchers, it is important
to take the nature of the linguistic phenomenon, the quality and quantity of
the input, and cross-linguistic interference into consideration when
investigating child heritage speakers’ minority language grammar (Schwartz et
al., 2015; Cuza, 2016).
In Chapter 8, ‘Basque-Spanish Bilingual Children’s Expressive and Receptive
Grammatical Abilities’, Rhiannon M. Anderson, Marcel R. Giezen and Marie
Pourquié provide detailed information about their experimental study that was
focused on the grammatical abilities of simultaneous Basque-Spanish bilinguals
based on sentence production and comprehension tasks in both languages. The
authors’ aim was to investigate whether there were any expressive-receptive
gaps in the grammatical abilities of the participants. The findings indicated
that the bilingual children had better performances in Spanish than they did
in Basque in sentence production, while there was no difference between the
languages in terms of sentence comprehension. The authors found that there was
an expressive-receptive gap in both languages; however, this gap was larger in
Basque. Object-verb agreement errors were mainly revealed in Basque
production, which could be explained by the fact that Spanish is characterised
by subject-verb agreement, while Basque is not. In general, the authors
suggest that expressive-receptive gaps could be observed at the grammatical
level, which is in line with the previous research (Chondrogianni & Marinis,
2012; Keller et al., 2015), and is dependent on the structural similarity
between a bilingual speaker’s two languages.
Chapter 9, ‘Adjective-Noun Order in Papiamento-Dutch Code-Switching’ by
Leticia Pablos, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, Bastien Boutonnet, Amy de Jong,
Marlou Perquin, Annelies de Haan and Niels O. Schiller, presents an overview
of their experimental study of Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech. The authors
measured the online comprehension of code-switched utterances with the use of
the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) research methodology. Their interest
was in the nominal constructions in Papiamento-Dutch bilingual speech,
particularly when there was a combination of an adjective from one language
and a noun from the other. Dutch and Papiamento differ in terms of adjective
position, as it is pre-nominal in the former and post-nominal in the latter
(Parafita Couto & Gullberg, 2017). Three theoretical accounts related to the
mechanisms underlying word order in noun-adjective switches were tested,
specifically: (i) the adjective determines word order (Cantone & MacSwan,
2009), (ii) the matrix language determines word order (Myers-Scotton, 2002),
and (iii) either order is possible (Di Sciullo, 2014). The results of the
study regarding syntactic coactivation and the production-comprehension link
are discussed according to these three theoretical models.
Chapter 10, ‘Production, Comprehension and Repetition of Accusative Case by
Monolingual Russian and Bilingual Russian-Dutch and Russian-Hebrew-Speaking
Children’ by Bibi Janssen and Natalia Meir, presents their study of the
acquisition of the Russian accusative case inflections by Russian-Dutch and
Russian-Hebrew bilinguals, who were heritage learners of Russian, in
comparison to monolingual Russian-speaking children. The participants were
asked to perform three tasks, namely elicited production, forced-choice
comprehension and sentence repetition. The analysis of the data revealed that
the accusative case inflection was perceived as a reliable cue by monolingual
children, which is in line with the Unified Competition Model (MacWhinney,
2008, 2012). However, bilingual children showed a different pattern in their
performances, as they scored lower for nouns with an accusative case marker.
The findings suggest that bilinguals had low sensitivity to the accusative
case cue, which is important research evidence with regard to the Unified
Competition Model because it indicates that limited exposure to the heritage
language negatively affects bilinguals’ cue detection in the heritage
language.
EVALUATION
This volume, which is co-edited by four leading international specialists, is
an extremely important contribution to the field of adult and child bilingual
acquisition. It is a collection of recent studies of psycholinguistic
approaches to production and comprehension in bilingualism, and is a valuable
source of information for those who are working in the field with respect to
the theoretical and methodological issues of bilingualism research, and the
perceptive and productive skills of adult and child bilinguals. This book
provides frameworks for understanding bilingualism based on diverse topics and
analyses. Each chapter presents a different study with a relevant literature
review, the research design and the methodology, with a focus on a specific
linguistic phenomenon and language combination, a data analysis and an
interpretation. The book is ideal for students of (psycho)linguistics, second
language acquisition and bilingualism, as well as for experts and researchers
wishing to update their knowledge regarding psycholinguistic approaches to
bilingualism.
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Andreou, M., Knopp, E., Bongartz, C., & Tsimpli, I. (2015). Character
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sviatlana Karpava is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the Department of
English Studies at the University of Cyprus. Her main research interests are
applied linguistics, first and second language acquisition, bilingualism,
multilingualism, sociolinguistics, teaching and education.<br
/>https://www.ucy.ac.cy/dir/en/cb-profile/skarpa01
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