Robert Fiorentino - US grants

This award will support a U.S. graduate student to conduct research in East Asia. The primary goals of the East Asia Summer Institute program are to expose students to East Asia science and engineering in the context of a research laboratory, and to initiate personal relationships that will foster research collaborations with foreign counterparts in the future. This project will provide the student with first hand research experience, an introduction to science and science policy infrastructure, and orientation to culture and language in East Asia.

When native speakers of American English begin learning Spanish, their acquisition of native-like pronunciation can be hampered by the tap versus trill distinction in words like CARO 'expensive' and CARRO 'car'. The trill proves difficult because it does not exist in English. The tap exists as an allophone of /t/ and /d/ in English words like 'writer' and 'rider', but English speakers must learn to process it as a phoneme rather than an allophone. Similarly, learners have difficulty acquiring the spirantization of voiced stops, where the /d/ in CODO 'elbow' is produced as a voiced dental fricative, which is more like the 'th' sound in English.

This study investigates whether American English-speaking learners of Spanish can be trained to perceive and produce the intervocalic tap, trill, /t/, and /d/ contrasts in Spanish. Participants will be trained using both perceptual and production training methods. Past research has reported that perceptual training alone improves both perception and production and that production training alone improves both as well, but the production training studies have not been limited to production as trainees have been able to listen to the training stimuli.

Both training modalities will be systematically controlled in this study so that they can be directly compared. A third training methodology will be introduced that includes both perception and production to discover whether perceptual training, production training, or a combination of the two is most effective. This study will use cross-modal priming and ERP data in addition to traditional tasks (identification and production tasks) to evaluate the effect of training, an innovative use of both tasks to determine if trainees not only perceive and produce the trained L2 contrasts but also if they unconsciously process these contrasts and if they have built new phonemic categories for these sounds.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Understanding the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms with which words are stored and retrieved from the mental lexicon is critical to our understanding of how language is organized in the human brain. Fundamental aspects of this process, however, remain unclear. A major debate concerns whether complex words like 'teacup'are stored and retrieved in terms of smaller parts called morphemes (tea/cup), or whether all words are treated alike as whole-word chunks. As these views make fundamentally distinct predictions regarding the nature of word representations, investigating complex words becomes crucial. This project involves recording brain activity using high temporal resolution magnetoencephalography (MEG) during complex word processing, allowing real-time measurement of the stages of word recognition and their brain- level instantiation, prior to any overt judgment such as reaction time. Utilizing these time-sensitive brain-level measurements provides a new way forward in investigating whether the mental lexicon involves internally- structured representations, the time course and constraints on their decomposition, and what cortical mechanisms subserve these computations. Specifically, the timing and neural bases of complex word processing will be examined by taking advantage of the specific linguistic properties of compound words, allowing careful manipulation of variables that may constrain decomposition, in ways difficult or impossible when examining affixed (e.g. past-tense) words only. Establishing whether the brain initially processes both known complex words (e.g., 'teacup') and novel words which may have meaningful word parts (e.g. 'drugrack') in terms of those meaningful word parts will inform our understanding of whether the meaningful word part or the whole-word is the basic unit of representation in word recognition. Further, measuring brain responses to compound words with relatively transparent meaning relations (e.g. 'teacup') and those without (like 'honeymoon'), provides a direct test of whether, when, and with what underlying neural mechanisms words are recognized, and in particular whether meaningful word parts constitute a fundamental level of word representation independent of the levels of word form and word meaning. Developing a fuller neurocognitive model of word reading has direct health-related impact for addressing the range of language disorders involving word recognition and reading deficits, including dyslexia, Specific Language Impairment, aphasias, and Alzheimer's disease, increasing the potential for identifying new treatments for these deficits, many of which involve pervasive yet poorly understood problems with word parts. Further, the MEG assays developed may provide sensitive new tools for diagnosing and directly measuring brain-level effects of therapy in clinical intervention. This research project investigates the nature and cortical mechanisms underlying the reading of complex words. Better understanding the basic cognitive processes in word reading has direct impact for our understanding of language disorders, for which the reading of complex words presents fundamental, though still poorly understood challenges, including dyslexia, Specific Language Impairment, disorders associated with stroke and brain trauma, and diseases including Alzheimer's Disease and Parkinson's Disease. Both the findings and the innovative brain-level measurements of visual word recognition developed in this project have direct potential for application to the characterization, diagnosis, and remediation of these disorders.

The leading questions in adult second language acquisition explore what capacities the learner brings to the initial task of language learning, how the second language develops over time, and whether native-like attainment is possible. Recently these questions have been addressed from the perspective of neurolinguistics, allowing a fine-grained characterization of the processes underlying online comprehension in second language learners. Several studies of high-proficiency late learners have reported native-like effects for syntactic processing but we still have little understanding of the constraints on native-like attainment, as many of these studies have investigated properties that are similar in the first and second languages. In addition, studies of very early learners have shown that similarity between the native and target language modulates the emergence of native-like effects, but we still have little understanding of whether it is similarity in the inventory of morphosyntactic features or similarity in the way in which a given morphosyntactic feature is realized in the surface morphology that facilitates acquisition. The present project addresses these outstanding issues, utilizing event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the processing of gender and number agreement by English-speaking adult learners of Spanish. The first study examines learners at three proficiency levels, investigating both the role of the native language and the role of structural distance between the agreeing elements at different stages of development and examining whether or not native-like attainment is possible when properties differ in the first and second language. The second, longitudinal study, tracks students enrolled in their first year of Spanish in order to examine developmental changes in brain responses at three different points. This study investigates whether learners are sensitive to agreement anomalies at early stages and examines to what extent this sensitivity is modulated by the properties of the native language and the structural distance between the agreeing elements.

In adopting both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal approach, the project examines both the constraints on native-like attainment and the way neurophysiological effects emerge during development, crucially investigating what factors affect development throughout acquisition. The study will thus shed light on the developmental process of adult second language acquisition and will introduce a new framework for investigating the components of the second language that present the biggest challenge throughout different stages of learning, informing pedagogical approaches for adult learners. Furthermore, investigating the nature and scope of adult second language acquisition provides a highly-constrained, hypothesis-driven test case for probing the reorganization of a cognitive system in adulthood. Thus, this approach to examining second language acquisition will provide new insights regarding the nature of brain plasticity more broadly. The project will also serve to train the next generation of linguistics undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of second language acquisition and neurolinguistics.

This grant provides support for the 2012 Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition-North America (GALANA) conference, with a special theme on Psycholinguistic and Neurolinguistic Approaches to Language Development. The conference will be held at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas on October 11-13, 2012.

This conference will be the fifth meeting of GALANA, an international conference which has emerged as a leading forum for research in language development that is informed by linguistic theory. Language acquisition research in the generative framework addresses several core questions regarding the mental representation of linguistic knowledge, the ways in which that knowledge emerges over time, and the degree to which that knowledge is specialized or independent of other cognitive domains. In recent years, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic techniques have provided new ways to investigate the recruitment of linguistic knowledge in real time processing, and have successfully been utilized with both child and adult learner populations. The goal of this session is to consider the application of these new approaches for theory building and testing in the domains of first and second language acquisition. This session will be the first of its kind to consider first language acquisition, second language acquisition, and language disorders under the same umbrella. As there is overlap with respect to the core theoretical questions at the heart of these sub-fields, it is advantageous to encourage discussion among researchers from these different disciplines.

The findings of this conference will be broadly disseminated in two outlets: a proceedings volume for the general conference and a special issue of a journal that will be dedicated to the special theme. The conference encourages broad participation by highlighting the work of junior scholars in several invited presentations. The conference also encourages participation from junior researchers by offering merit-based travel awards to graduate students and post-docs.

Multilingualism is increasingly important in our diverse society, although relatively little is known about what makes someone a 'good' second language learner. While children acquire language with relative ease, adults show persistent difficulty becoming proficient in a second language. It has been hypothesized that individuals with increased cognitive abilities are better able to process and comprehend language, suggesting that individual differences in cognitive abilities may be related to successful language processing. This dissertation uses electroencephalography (EEG) to examine how individual differences in cognitive abilities influence second language comprehension, focusing on how native English speakers and Chinese-speaking learners of English comprehend complex sentences in real time. Using the brain imaging technique EEG to examine the processing of a second language has the potential to advance our understanding of the extent to which the brain is able to reorganize itself to accommodate a new language in adulthood. Thus, this project holds promise for providing new insights regarding the nature of brain plasticity more broadly.

This project examines the extent to which processing in native and non-native speakers is qualitatively similar, testing the predictions of alternative theories in language learning and language processing. When a participant reads a sentence like "I wonder who the editor interviewed Dave with," they must search for the position in the sentence from which the word "who" originated, a relationship that is referred to as a wh- dependency. Participants will read sentences such as these as their brain activity is recorded using EEG in order to track the processing of the wh- dependency throughout the sentence. The project examines the extent to which the processing of wh-dependencies in both learners and native speakers involves predicting parts of the structure that have not yet been encountered and whether both groups only attempt to complete the dependency in positions in the sentence that the grammar allows. All participants will also be assessed on a battery of cognitive tests, in order to determine how individual differences in cognitive abilities impact native and non-native processing. Using EEG allows for an examination of whether natives and learners use qualitatively similar processing mechanisms and whether processing unfolds on a similar time-course, providing a more precise comparison between the two populations and shedding new light on the possibilities and limitations of adult second language (L2) acquisition.