5.7 What is Predicted by Language Proficiency

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The Bilingual Brain

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University of Houston System

The Bilingual Brain

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This course explores the brain bases of bilingualism by discussing literature relevant to differences in age of initial learning, proficiency, and control in the nonverbal, single language and dual-language literature. Participants will learn about the latest research related to how humans learn one or two languages and other cognitive skills.

À partir de la leçon

Week 5

Office Hours 520:31

5 Practice What You Speak6:26

5.1 Language Loss4:03

5.2 Catastrophic Loss4:45

5.3 Can a Lost Language be Found3:19

5.4 Plasticity and Language Acquisition5:29

5.5 Restructuring Plasticity9:43

5.6 The Dichotic Nature of Language6:26

5.7 What is Predicted by Language Proficiency3:37

5.8 From Everyday to Academic Language5:58

5.9 Academic and Everyday Grammar2:23

5.10 Language and Memory System3:43

5.11 Speech in a Second Language12:15

5.12 Language Learning as a Building Process1:51

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Arturo E. Hernandez
Professor
Psychology

So what is determined by language proficiency?

And, we can ask this question looking at

studies that have investigated the difference between semantic processing,

that is a processing of meaning, and grammatical processing.

You might recall from a previous section where I discuss two different studies.

One using EEG that looked at

a group of second language learners, this is work by Weber-Fox and

Neville, in which these subjects varied in the age at which they learned English.

And there was a second study done with FMRI done by Wartenberger and

colleagues and in that study they also looked at groups of

people that varied in when they learned the second language.

And in the previous section we discussed results which showed that

grammatical violations were in general more sensitive to

when a person learned a second language.

That is, if they learned a language early or

late in life affected either the EEG signal or

the brain activity observed during the processing of grammatical violations.

In these two studies,

the researchers also looked at what happens when there's a semantic violation.

Semantic violation, as I noted in a previous section,

something like I take my coffee with milk and dog, right?

In that case what happens is that the word that's incorrect doesn't fit semantically.

So in Weber-Fox and Neville's study,

they looked at people who had learned English at various different ages.

And what they found was that the age of when they

learned English didn't matter as much for semantic processing.

Now it's not that it didn't matter at all.

They did find there were differences in the latest group,

those who acquired English between 11 and 16.

In that group they could see differences in the brain waves for

semantic violations, for these errors in meaning.

But in the earlier groups, they found roughly what looked like native types of

N400 waves, these waves that occur at 400 milliseconds and

indicate when a word is more difficult to process.

And they appear in sentences like, I take my coffee with milk and dog.

So only the latest group, those who learned English much later in life,

showed a difference relative to the early learners and relative to monolinguals.

Now, the interesting part about this is that these later learners were

also lower in proficiency.

They didn't speak English as well as the younger learners of English.

This suggests that what modulates the ability to

process meaning is the proficiency, the ability in that language.

Wartenberger, using functional magnetic resonance imaging,

found similar types of results.

Those who spoke the language less proficiently show differences when

processing these semantic types of errors.

And this suggests there's a dissociation between grammatical processing being

associated with early learning and

semantic processing being more sensitive to how well somebody speaks a language.

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