The effects of heritage multilingualism on foreign language learning: a comparison of children with typical language development and developmental language disorder

Introduction

Both multilingualism and developmental language disorder (DLD) may be associated with inferior performance in the majority language, albeit for different reasons. At the same time, there is a growing body of evidence that multilingualism may have a positive effect on foreign language performance. This study tests the hypothesis that the positive effects of multilingualism on foreign language learning may be smaller in children with DLD compared to their multilingual peers with typical language development.

Methods

In a 2 × 2 design, we compare the effects of multilingualism and DLD on English as a foreign language performance and majority language performance of multilinguals and monolinguals with and without DLD. The participants were primary school children (aged 9-13) acquiring Dutch as the majority language and learning English as a school subject. English skills were measured with a vocabulary test, a grammar test and the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). Dutch skills were assessed with the Litmus Sentence Repetition Task and the MAIN task. The MAIN narratives in both languages were analyzed for fluency, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity and grammatical accuracy. The control variables included age, working memory, declarative memory, procedural memory and (for English) amount of extracurricular exposure and length of instruction. Data were analyzed by means of multilevel linear regression.

Results

The results demonstrate that both multilingualism and DLD were associated with lower scores on the Dutch Sentence Repetition Task and lower grammatical accuracy of narratives. In English, the multilinguals outperformed monolinguals on all measures, except grammatical accuracy of narratives, and the interactions between Background and Group were not significant. Another strong predictor of EFL performance, along with the multilingual status, was extracurricular exposure to English.

Memory representations are flexibly adapted to orthographic systems: A comparison of English and Hebrew

Across languages, speech unfolds in the same temporal order, constrained by the forward flow of time. But the way phonology is spatially mapped onto orthography is language-specific, ranging from left-to-right, right-to-left, and top-to-bottom, among others. While the direction of writing systems influences how known words are visually processed, it is unclear whether it influences learning and memory for novel orthographic regularities. The present study tested English and Hebrew speakers on an orthographic word-referent mapping task in their native orthographies (written left-to-right and right-to-left, respectively), where the onsets and offsets of words were equally informative cues to word identity. While all individuals learned orthographic word-referent mappings significantly above chance, the parts of the word that were most strongly represented varied. English monolinguals false alarmed most to competing foils that began with the same bigram as the target, representing word onsets most strongly. However, Hebrew bilinguals trained on their native orthography showed no difference between false alarm rates to onset and offset competitors, representing the beginning and ends of words equally strongly. Importantly, Hebrew bilinguals tested on English words displayed a more English-like false alarm pattern (although not a full switch), suggesting that memory biases adapt to the opposite directionality of encountered text while retaining traces of native language biases. These findings demonstrate that experience with different writing systems influences how individuals represent novel orthographic words, starting in the earliest stages of learning.

Non-adjacent dependency learning from variable input: investigating the effects of bilingualism, phonological memory, and cognitive control

Introduction

One proposed advantage of bilingualism concerns the ability to extract regularities based on frequency information (statistical learning). Specifically, it has been proposed that bilinguals have an advantage in statistical learning that particularly holds in situations of variable input. Empirical evidence on this matter is scarce. An additional question is whether a potential bilingual advantage in statistical learning can be attributed to enhancements in phonological memory and cognitive control. Previous findings on effects of bilingualism on phonological memory and cognitive control are not consistent.

Method

In the present study, we compared statistical learning from consistent and variable input in monolingual and bilingual children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2). We also explored whether phonological memory and cognitive control might account for any potential group differences found.

Results

The findings suggest that there might be some advantage of bilinguals in statistical learning, but that this advantage is not robust: It largely surfaced only in t-tests against chance for the groups separately, did not surface in the same way for children and adults, and was modulated by experiment order. Furthermore, our results provide no evidence that any enhancement in bilinguals' statistical learning was related to improved phonological memory and cognitive control: bilinguals did not outperform monolinguals on these cognitive measures and performance on these measures did not consistently relate to statistical learning outcomes.

Discussion

Taken together, these findings suggest that any potential effects of bilingualism on statistical learning probably do not involve enhanced cognitive abilities associated with bilingualism.

One language or two? Navigating cross-language conflict in statistical word segmentation

Bilingual infants must navigate the similarities and differences between their languages to achieve native proficiency in childhood. Bilinguals learning to find individual words in fluent speech face the possibility of conflicting cues to word boundaries across their languages. Despite this challenge, bilingual infants typically begin to segment and learn words in both languages around the same time as monolinguals. It is possible that early bilingual experience may support infants' abilities to track regularities relevant for word segmentation separately across their languages. In a dual speech stream statistical word segmentation task, we assessed whether 16-month-old infants could track syllable co-occurrence regularities in two artificial languages despite conflicting information across the languages. We found that bilingual, but not monolingual, infants were able to segment the dual speech streams using statistical regularities. Although the two language groups did not differ on secondary measures of cognitive and linguistic development, bilingual infants' real-world experience with bilingual speakers was predictive of their performance in the dual language statistical segmentation task.

Take Home Points: How to Use Statistical Learning

Purpose

The purpose of this epilogue is to synthesize the main points of the articles in this issue on statistical learning for clinicians. These points can be used to guide practice.

Statistical Learning: How it Relates to Speech-Language Pathology

Purpose

The purpose of this special issue is to introduce speech-language pathologists to the topic of statistical learning and how this is relevant to their practice. In the following articles, the concept of statistical learning will be explained, and readers will find (a) research studies showing how children with special needs can use statistical learning to learn language; (b) tutorials that show why statistical learning is meaningful for special populations; and (c) tutorials that show how statistical learning is involved in language, reading, and spelling.

Bilingual and Monolingual First Language Acquisition Experience Differentially Shapes Children's Property Term Learning: Evidence from Behavioral and Neurophysiological Measures

Studies of novel noun learning show bilingual children rely less on the Mutual Exclusivity Constraint (MEC) for word learning than monolinguals. Shifting the focus to learning novel property terms (adjectives), the present study compared 3.5- and five-year-old bilingual and monolingual preschoolers' adherence to the MEC. We found no bilingual-monolingual differences on a behavioral forced-choice task for the 3.5-year-olds, but five-year-old monolinguals adhered more to the MEC than bilinguals did. Older bilinguals adhered less to the MEC than younger ones, while there was no difference in MEC adherence between the younger and older monolinguals. In the 5-year-olds, we additionally acquired neurophysiological data using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to allow for a first explorative look at potential neuronal underpinnings. The data show that, compared to bilinguals, monolinguals reveal higher activation over three brain regions (right frontal, left temporo-parietal, and left prefrontal) that may be involved in exploiting the MEC, building on conflict detection, inhibition, solution of a disjunction, and working memory processes. Taken together, our behavioral and neurophysiological findings reveal different paths towards novel property term learning depending on children's language acquisition context.

Multi-Pattern Visual Statistical Learning in Monolinguals and Bilinguals

To date, the impact of bilingualism on statistical learning remains unclear. Here we test a novel visual statistical learning task that affords simultaneous learning of two types of regularities: co-occurrence regularities between pairs of elements and the co-occurrence of visual features that could define categories. We compared performance by English monolinguals, Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals, as previous studies have suggested that bilinguals might be more open than monolinguals to the presence of multiple regularities, though no previous studies have tested the learning of multiple patterns within a single task. We demonstrated that both monolingual and bilingual participants could learn the co-occurrence probabilities and the features that define categories. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to demonstrate that learners can extract co-occurrence regularities along two dimensions in the visual modality. However, we did not detect significant differences in performance across groups. We close by discussing the implications for the growing literature on bilingualism and statistical learning.