Languages differ in how they carve up the world by their labeling of objects and events. For example, the Chinese word closest to the English word "sofa" includes padded, upholstered seats for one person, while the Chinese word closest to the English word "chair" is limited to unpadded seating made of hard materials, such as wood. How do people learning two languages handle such differences? Do they develop separate ways of connecting words to the world in each language or do they learn a single and unique way that does not fully match monolinguals in either language? In this project, the investigators attempt to understand, within the broader context of language interaction in the bilingual mind, how the pattern of word use in one's first language (L1) can influence that in the second language (L2), how L1 knowledge itself can change as L2 knowledge increases, and how the fluctuating experience and knowledge of one language can create the conditions for language interactions to occur. The project will use both behavioral studies and computational modeling to explore the unique and joint contributions of a set of cognitive variables (age of exposure to each language, proficiency in each, and the type of exposure to each) to bilingual lexical knowledge.
As globalization advances, more peopleare becoming bilingual or multilingual. The study of language interaction in individuals has implications for understanding the bilingual person's verbal communication, social integration, and consequent career opportunities and may yield information useful for designing learning interventions to improve language proficiency. The proposed work will integrate research and education across the two collaborative sites (Pennsylvania State University and Lehigh University). The research also involves international collaborations between scientists in the US, Europe, and China. The cross-disciplinary nature of the project should attract students from psychology, linguistics, and cognitive and computational sciences, providing opportunities particularly to students from bilingual and bi-cultural backgrounds.
In this project we are interested in how the bilingual speaker's two languages interact in the mind and brain through a set of behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging studies. Second-language learning research traditionally examined transfer from the first language (L1) to the second (L2) assuming a stable L1. Only recently has it been recognized that L1 and L2 may exert mutual influences and there are significant effects resulting from cross-language interactions within the same speaker. Understanding performance in one's native and non-native languages requires the study of their interactions over the course of language learning and use. Our research is the first to systematically examine in detail the semantic representations that determine the context to which a word is applied, and how those representations are altered by exposure to a second language. Findings from our studies are delineating the conditions under which such alterations occur and how native-like L1 and L2 representations are best developed and maintained. More broadly, this work is introducing a new set of questions and methods to the study of language learning and the impact that one language has on the other. Our work has significant appeal to disciplines such as applied linguistics, second language learning and teaching, given that the issues addressed by our project relate to the mental representations and learning of vocabulary in the bilingual's first and second languages. For example, our work has indicated that the timing of immersion is important for nativelike-ness in using the second language lexicon. In addition, the exposure to a second language, sometimes even through brief training, could have significant impact on one's first language representation, demonstrating that the native language is much more permeable than previously thought. As globalization advances, more people become bilingual or multilingual. While the speech of monolinguals does not represent a gold standard, excessive deviation from the language community in which one resides can impede communication, social integration, and job opportunities. Our studies have implications for understanding the computational processes and neurocognitive mechanisms underlying second language learning and teaching. Our findings are helping to reveal under what circumstances lexical interactions come about and how they can be minimized by optimizing training regimens. In addition, understanding of the cross-language differences in lexical categorization will have significant impact on bilingual language communication in various context, and help teachers of second language to better prepare students to become global citizens with multilingual skills and communicative abilities.
