Home Tuning to languages: experience-based approaches to the language science of bilingualism
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Tuning to languages: experience-based approaches to the language science of bilingualism

  • Anne L. Beatty-Martínez EMAIL logo and Paola E. Dussias EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 13, 2018

Abstract

Experience-based approaches to language hold that individuals become sensitive to distributed emergent phenomena in their linguistic experience. The purpose of this paper is to bring together experience-based perspectives from the domains of cognitive psychology and linguistics. First, we present an overview of the cognitive processes that underpin experience-based learning, and review the cognitive biases that have been attributed to the emergence of distributional regularities in language. We then discuss the P-chain (Dell, G. S. & F. Chang. 2014. The P-chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 369(20120394). 1–9.), an influential experience-based framework for experience-based theory in psycholinguistics, and present data from bilingual speakers to substantiate the assumptions of the model. Our goal is to focus on language usage in bilinguals to illustrate how individuals can become attuned to linguistic variation in the input and how this input can act as constraining information with critical psycholinguistic implications.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Judy Kroll, Teresa Bajo, John Lipski, and Matthew Carlson for helpful comments and discussions during the preparation of this paper. The writing of this paper was supported in part by NSF grants BCS-1535124, NSF grant OISE-0968369, NSF grant OISE-1545900, NIH Grant HD082796 and NIH Grant HD071758 to Paola Dussias.

References

Acheson, D. J. & M. C. MacDonald. 2009. Approaches to the serial ordering of verbal information. Psychological Bulletin 135. 50–68.10.1037/a0014411Search in Google Scholar

Altmann, G. T. M. & J. Mirković. 2009. Incrementality and prediction in human sentence processing. Cognitive Science 33. 583–609.10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01022.xSearch in Google Scholar

Anderson, J. R. 1982. Acquisition of cognitive skill. Psychological Review 89. 362–380.10.1016/B978-1-4832-1446-7.50032-7Search in Google Scholar

Bates, E. & B. MacWhinney. 1982. Functionalist approaches to grammar. In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bavelier, D., R. L. Achtman, M. Mani & J. Föcker. 2012. Neural bases of selective attention in action video game players. Vision Research 61. 132–143. 10.1016/j.visres.2011.08.007Search in Google Scholar

Beatty-Martínez, A. L. & P. E. Dussias. 2017. Bilingual experience shapes language processing: Evidence from codeswitching. Journal of Memory and Language 95. 173–189.10.1016/j.jml.2017.04.002Search in Google Scholar

Beatty-Martínez, A. L., C. A. Navarro-Torres, M. C. Parafita Couto & P. E. Dussias. 2017. The codeswitching map task corpus. Manuscript in preparation.Search in Google Scholar

Bernolet, S. & R. J. Hartsuiker. 2010. Does verb bias modulate syntactic priming? Cognition 114. 455–461.10.1016/j.cognition.2009.11.005Search in Google Scholar

Bialystok, E. & A.-M. Depape. 2009. Musical expertise, bilingualism, and executive functioning. Journal of Experimental Psychology 35. 565–574.Search in Google Scholar

Bock, K. J., G. S. Dell, F. Chang & K. H. Onishi. 2007. Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production. Cognition 104. 437–458.10.1016/j.cognition.2006.07.003Search in Google Scholar

Bock, K. J. & D. E. Irwin. 1980. Syntactic effects of information availability in sentence production. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19. 467–484.10.1016/S0022-5371(80)90321-7Search in Google Scholar

Bock, K. & Z. M. Griffin. 2000. The persistence of structural priming: Transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology 129. 177–192.10.1037/0096-3445.129.2.177Search in Google Scholar

Bock, K. J. & R. K. Warren. 1985. Conceptual accessibility and syntactic structure in sentence formulation. Cognition 21. 47–67.10.1016/0010-0277(85)90023-XSearch in Google Scholar

Bybee, J. L. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511750526Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, J. L. 2013. Usage-based theory and exemplar representations of constructions. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, 49–69. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0004Search in Google Scholar

Bybee, J. L. & D. Eddington. 2006. A usage-based approach to Spanish verbs of ‘becoming’. Language 82. 323–355.10.1353/lan.2006.0081Search in Google Scholar

Christiansen, M. H., N. Chater. 2015. The language faculty that wasn’t: a usage-based account of natural language recursion. Frontiers in Psychology 6(1182). 1–18.10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01182Search in Google Scholar

Clark, A. 2013. Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36. 181–204.10.1017/S0140525X12000477Search in Google Scholar

Cohen, Henri & Claire Lefebvre (eds.). 2005. Handbook of categorization in cognitive science. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Inc.Search in Google Scholar

Croft, W. 1991. Syntactic categories and grammatical relations the cognitive organization of information. Chicago: The Univeristy of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar

Dell, G. S. & F. Chang. 2014. The P-chain: Relating sentence production and its disorders to comprehension and acquisition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 369(20120394). 1–9.Search in Google Scholar

DeLong, K. A., T. P. Urbach & M. Kutas. 2005. Probabilistic word pre-activation during language comprehension inferred from electrical brain activity. Nature Neuroscience 8. 1117–1121.10.1038/nn1504Search in Google Scholar

Draganski, B., C. Gaser, V. Busch, G. Schuierer, U. Bogdahn & A. May. 2004. Changes in grey matter induced by training Newly honed juggling skills show up as a transient feature on a brain-imaging scan. Nature 427. 311–312.10.1038/427311aSearch in Google Scholar

Dussias, P. E., J. R. Valdés Kroff, R. E. Guzzardo Tamargo & C. Gerfen. 2013. When gender and looking go hand in hand: Grammatical gender processing in L2 Spanish. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 35. 353–387.10.1017/S0272263112000915Search in Google Scholar

Ellis, N. C. 2002. Frequency effects in language processing: A review with implications for theories of implicit and explicit language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24. 143–188.10.1017/S0272263102002024Search in Google Scholar

Ellis, N. C., M. B. O. Donnell & U. T. E. Römer. 2015. Usage-based language learning. Language Learning 63. 25–51.10.1111/j.1467-9922.2012.00736.xSearch in Google Scholar

Ferreira, V. S. & K. Bock. 2006. The functions of structural priming. Language and Cognitive Processes 21. 1011–1029.10.1080/01690960600824609Search in Google Scholar

Ferreira, V. S. & H. Yoshita. 2003. Given-new ordering effects on the production of scrambled sentences in Japanese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32. 669–692.10.1023/A:1026146332132Search in Google Scholar

Fillmore, C. J. 1988. The mechanisms of construction grammar. In Proceedings of the fourth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (pp. 35–55).10.3765/bls.v14i0.1794Search in Google Scholar

Franks, J. J. & J. D. Bransford. 1971. Abstraction of visual patterns. Journal of Experimental Psychology 90. 65–74.10.1037/h0031349Search in Google Scholar

Frazier, L. 1979. On comprehending sentences: Syntactic parsing strategies. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club.Search in Google Scholar

Gahl, S. & S. M. Garnsey. 2004. Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language 80. 748–775.10.1353/lan.2004.0185Search in Google Scholar

Gallistel, C. R. 1990. The organization of learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar

Garrett, M. F. 1980. Levels of processing in sentence production. In. B. Butterworth (ed.), Language production, vol. 1: Speech and talk, 177–220. London, UK: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar

Gennari, S. P., J. Mirković & M. C. Macdonald. 2012. Animacy and competition in relative clause production: A cross-linguistic investigation. Cognitive Psychology 65. 141–176.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.03.002Search in Google Scholar

Gentner, D. 1983. Structure mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science 7. 155–170.10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3Search in Google Scholar

Givón, T. 1995. Functionalism and grammar. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.74Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, A. E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001Search in Google Scholar

Goldberg, A. E. 2013. Constructionist approaches. In T. Hoffmann & G. Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, 15–31. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195396683.013.0002Search in Google Scholar

Green, D., J. Abutalebi. 2013. Language control in bilinguals: The adaptive control hypothesis. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 2013. 515–530.10.1080/20445911.2013.796377Search in Google Scholar

Guzzardo Tamargo, R. E., J. R. Valdés Kroff & P. E. Dussias. 2016. Examining the relationship between comprehension and production processes in code-switched language. Journal of Memory and Language 89. 138–161.10.1016/j.jml.2015.12.002Search in Google Scholar

Hahne, A. & A. D. Friederici. 1999. Electrophysiological evidence for two steps in syntactic analysis: Early automatic and late controlled processes. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 11. 194–205.10.1162/089892999563328Search in Google Scholar

Hasher, L. & R. T. Zacks. 1984. Automatic processing of fundamental information: The case of frequency of occurrence. American Psychologist 39. 1372–1388.10.1037/0003-066X.39.12.1372Search in Google Scholar

Hopp, H. 2016. Learning (not) to predict: Grammatical gender processing in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 32. 277–307.10.1177/0267658315624960Search in Google Scholar

Ibbotson, P. 2013. The scope of usage-based theory. Frontiers in Psychology 4(225). 1–15.10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00255Search in Google Scholar

Jaeger, T. F. 2006. Redundancy and syntactic reduction in spontaneous speech. Stanford, CA: Stanford University dissertation.Search in Google Scholar

Jaeger, T. F. & H. Tily. 2011. On language ‘utility’: Processing complexity and communicative efficiency. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science 2. 323–335.10.1002/wcs.126Search in Google Scholar

Johnston, J. C. 1978. A test of the sophisticated guessing theory of word perception. Cognitive Psychology 10. 123–153.10.1016/0010-0285(78)90011-7Search in Google Scholar

Kelly, M. H. & S. Martin. 1994. Domain-general abilities applied to domain-specific tasks: Sensitivity to probabilities in perception, cognition, and language. Lingua 92. 105–140.10.1016/0024-3841(94)90339-5Search in Google Scholar

Kemper, S., L. Hoffman, R. Schmalzried, R. Herman & D. Kieweg. 2011. Tracking talking: Dual task costs of planning and producing speech for young versus older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition 18. 257–279.10.1080/13825585.2010.527317Search in Google Scholar

Kroll, J. F., P. E. Dussias, K. Bice & L. Perrotti. 2015. Bilingualism, mind, and brain. Annual Review of Linguistics 1. 377–394.10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124937Search in Google Scholar

Kroll, J. F. & C. Navarro-Torres. in press. Bilingualism. In J. Wixted (ed.), Stevens’ handbook of experimental psychology (4th edn.), vol. 4. Language and thought. New York, NY: Wiley.Search in Google Scholar

Kulick, D. 1992. Language shift and cultural reproduction: Socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Labov, W. 2010. Principles of linguistic change: vol. 3. Cognitive and cultural factors. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.10.1002/9781444327496Search in Google Scholar

Langacker, R. W. 1987. Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Search in Google Scholar

Lew-Williams, C. & A. Fernald. 2007. Young children learning Spanish make rapid use of grammatical gender in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science 18. 193–198.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01871.xSearch in Google Scholar

Lew-Williams, C. & A. Fernald. 2010. Real-time processing of gender-marked articles by native and non-native Spanish speakers. Journal of Memory and Language 63. 447–464.10.1016/j.jml.2010.07.003Search in Google Scholar

Lipski, J. M. 1978. Code-switching and the problem of bilingual competence. In M. Paradis (ed.), Aspects of bilingualism, 250–264. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press.Search in Google Scholar

MacDonald, M. C. 2013. How language production shapes language form and comprehension. Frontiers in Psychology 4(226). 1–16.10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00226Search in Google Scholar

MacDonald, M. C. & M. S. Seidenberg. 2006. Constraint satisfaction accounts of lexical and sentence comprehension. In M. J. Traxler & M. A. Gernbacher (eds.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (2nd edn.), 581–611. London, UK: Elsevier Inc.10.1016/B978-012369374-7/50016-XSearch in Google Scholar

MacDonald, M. C., N. J. Pearlmutter & M. S. Seidenberg. 1994. Syntactic ambiguity resolution as lexical ambiguity resolution. In C. J. Clifton, L. Frazier & R. Keith (eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing, 123–153. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar

Medin, D. L. & M. M. Schaffer. 1978. Context theory of classification learning. Psychological Review 85. 207–238.10.1037/0033-295X.85.3.207Search in Google Scholar

Miller, G. 1956. The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63. 81–97.10.1037/h0043158Search in Google Scholar

Mitchell, D. C. & F. Cuetos. 1991. The origins of parsing strategies. In C. Smith (ed.), Current issues in natural language processing, 1–12. Austin, TX: University of Austin Press.Search in Google Scholar

Newmeyer, F. J. 2006. On Gahl and Garnsey on grammar and usage. Language 82. 399–404.10.1353/lan.2006.0100Search in Google Scholar

Perrotti, L., M. Carlson, P. E. Dussias & M. Brown. 2015. Exposure to English can change Spanish speakers; processing strategies in Spanish. Paper presented at the 2015 Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, University of Campinas, Brazil, 6–9 May.Search in Google Scholar

Pfaff, C. 1979. Constraints on language mixing: Intrasentential code-switching and borrowing in Spanish/English. Language 55. 291–318.10.2307/412586Search in Google Scholar

Poplack, S. 1980. Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español [and finish in Spanish]: Toward a typology of codeswitching. Linguistics 18. 581–618.10.1515/ling.1980.18.7-8.581Search in Google Scholar

Reber, A. S. 1967. Implicit learning of artificial grammars. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 6. 855–863.10.1016/S0022-5371(67)80149-XSearch in Google Scholar

Reber, A. 1989. Implicit learning and tacit knowledge. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118. 219–235.10.1037/0096-3445.118.3.219Search in Google Scholar

Reicher, G. M. 1969. Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material. Journal of Experimental Psychology 81. 275–280.10.1037/h0027768Search in Google Scholar

Rosch, E. 1977. Human categorization. In N. Warren (ed.), Studies in cross-cultural psychology, vol. 1, 1–49. London, UK: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar

Saffran, J. R., E. L. Newport & R. N. Aslin. 1996. Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language 35. 606–621.10.1006/jmla.1996.0032Search in Google Scholar

Simon, H. A. 1974. How big is a chunk?: By combining data from several experiments, a basic human memory unit can be identified and measured. Science 183. 482–488.10.1126/science.183.4124.482Search in Google Scholar

Smith, M. & L. Wheeldon. 2004. Horizontal information flow in spoken sentence production. Journal of Experimental Psychology 30. 675–686.10.1037/0278-7393.30.3.675Search in Google Scholar

Stallings, L. M., M. C. MacDonald & P. G. O’Seaghdha. 1998. Phrasal ordering constraints in sentence production: Phrase length and verb disposition in heavy-NP shift. Journal of Memory and Language 39. 392–417.10.1006/jmla.1998.2586Search in Google Scholar

Staub, A. & C. Clifton Jr. 2006. Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either…or. Journal of Experimental Psychology 32. 425–436.10.1037/0278-7393.32.2.425Search in Google Scholar

Tanaka, M. N., H. P. Branigan, J. F. McLean & M. J. Pickering. 2011. Conceptual influences on word order and voice in sentence production: Evidence from Japanese. Journal of Memory and Language 65. 318–330.10.1016/j.jml.2011.04.009Search in Google Scholar

Terrace, H. S. 1987. Chunking by a pigeon in a serial learning task. Nature 325. 149–151.10.1038/325149a0Search in Google Scholar

Tily, H., S. Gahl, I. Arnon, N. Snider, A. Kothari & J. Bresnan. 2009. Syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech. Language and Cognition 1. 147–165.10.1515/LANGCOG.2009.008Search in Google Scholar

Tomasello, M. 2003. Introduction: Some surprises for psychologists. In: M. Tomasello (ed.), The New Psychology of Language, Vol. 2, 1–14. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar

Valdés Kroff, J. R. 2016. Mixed NPs in Spanish-English bilingual speech: Using a corpus-based approach to inform models of sentence processing. In R. E. Guzzardo Tamargo, C. M. Mazak & M. C. Parafita Couto (eds.), Spanish-English codeswitching in the Caribbean and the US, 281–300. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.10.1075/ihll.11.12valSearch in Google Scholar

Valdés Kroff, J. R., P. E. Dussias, C. Gerfen, L. Perrotti & M. T. Bajo. 2017. Experience with code-switching modulates the use of grammatical gender during sentence processing. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 7. 163–198. (accessed 01 February 2016).10.1075/lab.15010.valSearch in Google Scholar

Williams, H. & K. Staples. 1992. Syllable chunking in zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) song. Journal of Comparative Psychology 106. 278–286.10.1037/0735-7036.106.3.278Search in Google Scholar

Winston, P. H. 1980. Learning and reasoning by analogy. Communications of the ACM 23. 689–703.10.1145/359038.359042Search in Google Scholar

Yamashita, H. & F. Chang. 2001. ‘Long before short’ preference in the production of a head-final language. Cognition 81. B45–B55.10.1016/S0010-0277(01)00121-4Search in Google Scholar

Received: 2017-07-18
Accepted: 2017-09-13
Published Online: 2018-02-13

©2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Downloaded on 21.9.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingvan-2017-0034/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button