Language learning in bilinguals’ early development

One fact about humankind is that a large portion of human beings on this earth speaks more than one language. As mentioned before, our speech perception abilities undergo a binary modification towards the end of the first year of life in that our ability to differentiate between non-native contrasts decreases.  The question therefore arises what impact a bilingual context would have on such a typical phonetic development? Would the impact vary depending on whether an infant learns the second language at the same time as the first language or shortly after the first language?

Bilinguals who were exposed to their first (L1) and second (L2) languages from birth, are known as simultaneous bilinguals (Meisel, 1989). Simultaneous bilinguals differ from bilinguals who learned their second language when their lexical and phonological knowledge of their first language had already partially established. Those bilinguals are known as sequential bilinguals. While sequential bilingualism is considered to cause a transfer from the first onto the second language, simultaneous bilingualism is marked by both languages evolving relatively autonomously from one another (de Houwer, 2005; Meisel, 1989, 2001).

Since children will have lost their sensitivity to non-native speech sounds by the end of the first year of life, in sequential bilingualism, when children are exposed to the second language, they will need to regain their sensitivity to the non-native phonetic sounds including sounds that are distinct in the second language. For example, a child with Japanese as L1, who is now learning English as L2, would need to restore the perceptual difference between speech sounds /r/ and /l/ that in contrast to English language, belong to the same phonetic category in the Japanese language (Goto, 1971; Miyawaki et al., 1975). This way, they will be able to differentiate between /l/ and /r/, and understand that, for example, ‘lead’ and ‘read’ are words in English that differ in meaning.

What does the situation look like in simultaneous bilinguals who grew up in a bilingual language environment since birth? Previous research showed that infants are able to create and learn phonetic categories and contrasts because they are sensitive to how the phonetic values of the phonetic elements are statistically distributed in a language system (Maye, Werker and Gerken, 2002). Then, what is the impact of this sensitivity to how speech sounds are statistically distributed in the language input on infants who grew up in a bilingual context? If the role of continued exposure to contrasts in both languages is important, this would mean that by the age of 8 months, infants as simultaneous bilinguals would have created two phonetic categories. However, a distributional overlap between two contrasts in one language and one speech sound in the other language that represents an acoustically intermediate speech sound may give rise to a single extended phonetic category in the simultaneous bilingual infants that includes all three speech sounds (Bosch & Sebastian-Galles, 2003 a, b). The simultaneous bilingual infant would then have difficulties discriminating between these sounds.

This would imply that compared to monolingual infants’ perceptual abilities, simultaneous bilingual infants’ ability to create contrastive categories that are particular to a language is postponed by this cross-language distributional overlap of speech sounds. Researchers predicted that the extent to which speech sounds occur in both languages, i.e. the frequency occurrence of speech sounds, may counteract the impact that this delay has on bilingual infants’ discrimination ability (Sundara et al., 2008). They compared monolingual English infants’, monolingual French infants’ and bilingual French-English infants’ discrimination ability of English and French instances of /d/ (Sundara et al., 2008). They found that due to the high frequency of specific speech sounds tested, similar to monolingual English infants, bilingual 10-12 month olds were able to differentiate between different exemplars of French and English /d/ in spite of overlapping distributions of French and English /d/ (Sundara et al., 2008). Thus, apart from confirming previous evidence that statistical distributional learning assists infants in language learning (Saffran, 2003), the results specifically suggest that for a particular phonetic contrast, the question whether bilinguals follow a different developmental trajectory from matched monolingual controls depends on how frequent speech sounds from phonetic categories occur in actual speech, and on their cross-language distributional overlap.

References

Bosch, L., Sebastian-Galles, N. (2003a). Language experience and the perception of a voicing contrast in fricatives: Infant and adult data. In M.J. Sole, D. Recasens, & J. Romero (Eds.), Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1987-1990). Barcelona: Causal Productions.

 

De Houwer, A. (2005).  Early bilingual acquisition: Focus on morphosyntax and the Separate Development Hypothesis. In J.F. Kroll  & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp.30-48). New York: Oxford University Press.

Goto, H. (1971). Auditory perception by normal Japanese adults of the sounds L and R. Neuropsychologia, 9, 317-323.

Maye, J. Werker, J.F., & Gerken, L. (2002). Infant sensitivity to distributional information can affect phonetic discrimination. Cognitive Psychology, 82, B101-B111.

 

Meisel, J. (1989). Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children. In K. Hyltenstam & L. Obler (Eds.), Bilingualism across the lifespan. Aspects of acquisition, maturity and loss (pp. 13-40). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Meisel, J. M. (2001). The simultaneous acquisition of two first languages: Early differentiation and subsequent development of grammars. In J. Cenoz& F. Genese (Eds.), Trends in bilingual acquisition (pp.11-41). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Miyawaki, K., Strange, W., Verbrugge, R., & Liberman, A. M. (1975). An effect of linguistic experience: The discrimination of [r] and [l] by native speakers of Japanese and English. Perception & Psychophysics, 18, 331-340.

Saffran, J.R. (2003). Statistical language learning: Mechanisms and constraints. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 110-114.

Sundara, M., Polka, L., & Molnar, M. (2008). Development of coronal step perception: Bilingual infants keep pace with their monolingual peers. Cognition, 108, 232-242.

     
 

Modifications in speech to enhance intelligibility in the English language

What is the one tool that we use to solve problems and advance culture through the retention and transmission of knowledge? Exactly, it is language. What happens when we first learn a language? Early in life we appear to be able to differentiate between virtually all phonetic units in the world languages (Kuhl et al., 2008). And around the age of nine months infants adjust to the information of their native language. For example, cross-sectional and longitudinal studies showed that while 6-8 months old English infants distinguished between non-native consonant contrasts easily such as in the Hindi language, 10-12 months old infants had difficulty with this task (Werker & Tees, 1984a; Werker & Lalonde, 1988). Similarly, infants’ ability to distinguish between non-native vowel categories was reported to decrease as well (Werker & Tees, 1984a; Werker & Lalonde, 1988).

Thus, we can establish that our speech perception abilities undergo a binary modification towards the end of the first year of life (Kuhl et al., 2008). At around the same time in the English language, mothers talk to their infants in a way that has come to be known as motherese or infant-directed speech (IDS). Infant-directed speech involves acoustic changes such as increased mean pitch, increased emotional affect, and slow speech rate. Mothers also exaggerate the differences in the sound of vowels: Thus, if you have the words ‘sheep’, ‘shoe’ and ‘shark’, you will make the vowels ‘ee’, ‘oo’ and ‘aa’ sound more different from one another. This is known as increased vowel space (Kuhl, Andruski, Chistovich, Chistovich, & Kozhevnikova, 1997; Uther, Knoll, & Burnham, 2007).

All these acoustic changes are considered to facilitate language acquisition in infants. Prior research that compared IDS to clear read speech to test if those changes in IDS are uniquely didactic did indeed demonstrate increased vowel space in IDS compared to clear read speech (Kangatharan, 2016). Exaggerated vowel space has previously been correlated to speech intelligibility in IDS (Bradlow, Torretta, & Pisoni, 1996). It is exactly this acoustic aspect that was also observed in speech to adult foreigners (Uther et al., 2007).

The observation of exaggerated vowel space in IDS and in foreigner-directed speech (FDS) can be understood in the context of the Hyper-HypoSpeech theory by Lindblom (1990) according to which any changes in your speech signal are considerably influenced by who the listener is and what the speaking environment is. It is considered that speech production is a listener-oriented modification of speech. In this regard, the observation of exaggerated vowel space in IDS and FDS can be explained in the English language by the fact that both groups have the same linguistic needs (Uther et al., 2007). Thus, one can categorize these two groups as language learners as they are in clear need of an atypically clearer speech input, and speech with exaggerated vowel space is supposed to maximize speech intelligibility.

Recent research specifically found exaggerated vowel space to occur in speech to foreign-sounding rather than foreign-looking listeners (Kangatharan, 2016). This confirms in line with the H&H theory that speech is modified with regard to the listener’s linguistic needs rather than visual appearance. It was also demonstrated that speech with expanded vowel space resulted in increased speech intelligibility in both native English speakers and in second language learners of English in contrast to speech without expanded vowel space. The findings indicate that both first and second language learners of English can perceptually benefit from verbal adaptions in the English language if they have a didactic function (Kangatharan, 2016).

References

Bradlow, A. R., Torretta, G. M., & Pisoni, D. B. (1996). Intelligibility of normal speech. I. global and fine-rained acoustic-phonetic talker characteristics. Speech Communication, 20, 255–272.

 

Kangatharan, J. (2016). “The role of vowel hyperarticulation in clear speech to foreigners and infants: PhD Thesis publication.” European Acoustics Association Young Acoustics Network Newsletter, 47, Issue 2, 4-5.

Kuhl, P.K., Andruski, J.E., Chistovich, I.A., Chistovich, L.A., Kozhevnikova, E.V., Ryskina, V.L., Stolyarova, E.I., Sundberg, U., & Lacerda, F. (1997). Cross-language analysis of phonetic units in language addressed to infants. Science, 277, 684–686.

Kuhl, P. K., Conboy, B. T., Coffey-Corina, S., Padden, D., Rivera-Gaxiola, M., & Nelson, T. (2008). Phonetic learning as a pathway to language: New data and native language magnet theory expanded (NLM-e). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 363, 979-1000.

Lindblom, B. (1990). ‘Explaining phonetic variation: A sketch of the H&H theory’, 403-439 in Hardcastle W J & Marchal A (eds): Speech Production and Speech Modeling, Dordrecht:Kluwer.

Uther, M., Knoll, M. A., & Burnham, D. (2007). Do you speak E-NG-L-I-SH? A comparison of foreigner- and infant-directed speech. Speech Communication, 49, 2-7.

Werker, J. F., & Tees, R. C. (. (1984a). Cross-language speech perception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first year of life. Infant Behavior and Development, 7, 49-63. 

Werker, J. F., & Lalonde, C. E. (1988). Developmental Psychology, 24, 672-683.

 

Check out the sixth issue of NeuroMag!

What a great honour it is to have the NeuroMag celebrate the joys of neuropoetry in their 6th issue! Check page 11 below out for more! The neuropoems featuring NeuroMag can also be found together with extensive notes and explanations in my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' that will be out in its full version, and available on Amazon, and Barnes&Nobles!

Neuromag is a Tuebingen magazine that is written for both scientists and non-scientists. Please feel free to take a look at their website at  https://blog.neuromag.net/magazine/issue-6/ to read their current issue. In this issue the neuropoems are presented as neuropoetic riddles. Can you guess the answers?

To follow me to find out what I'm up to regarding neuropoetry, please feel free to check updates at https://twitter.com/JayanthinyK. To find out more about NeuroMag, you go can to https://twitter.com/neuro_mag!

Celebrating Brain Awareness Week 2020

As we are welcoming Brain Awareness Week 2020 starting this Monday, I decided to share some insights from the full version of my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' at Radio Harrow, which becomes available for purchase this month. Tune in this week for more information, or check out the following link to listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ecu8gkcmVwA

The interview at this link is the first of twelve parts. In the first part of the interview with Radio Harrow, I first define what neuropoetry is, and what my motivations were for writing this book. In the second part of the interview, I talk about the aims that I would like to meet with my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry'. I also talk about the aspects that give the book its unique touch.

In this book I present ideas on human experience and human nature at the interface between art and science. Therefore 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' is a particular written piece of neuroart. I also introduce in this book my poetic invention that is a new poem form that I call the 'rainbow poem'. This poem form was inspired by the rainbow, and I dedicate it to the beauty of nature.

In the additional parts of the interview I also address the connection between art and science, and in this case the link between poetry and neuroscience, the combination of which gives rise to neuropoetry. Both poetry and neuroscience can tell us about the meaning of our human experience, and I talk in more detail about this aspect in my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry'.

I also share in the interview how my book can help you start creating your own neuropoem. In the book I give further details regarding how poets, neuroscientists, teachers of poetry, neuroscience and languages, and everyone else can use the book to approach the topic of neuropoetry in the most practical way possible.

Moreover, in the interview I explain why there is a poet and a scientist in each and everyone of us. I also recite some neuropoems. Because I created the neuropoems as neuropoetic riddles, the host had the fun of guessing the answers to each neuropoem that I presented. Towards the end of the interview I shared some news on the events that I have planned to bring the idea of neuropoetry closer to different audiences.

You can find updates on my attendance at these events here in my blog. I also explain in the interview why 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' is a book for everyone, and how it is a multipurpose book. I end the interview by telling the host where you can get the book and when it becomes available.

The different ways of doing science communication

During my time as a PhD student, I became interested in blogging in order to communicate neuroscientific insights from research on language acquisition and processing and share them with a larger audience. I therefore created my first blog on 'Neuroscience of Speech Perception'. Later I found a more interactive way of doing science communication when as part of the Brunel Postgrad&Research Society (BPRS), which I had created, I founded Brunel's first postgrad radio show 'Academic Brunel' by joining the Media Association Society.

Outside the Brunel Radio Studio.

This show allowed me to broadcast postgraduates' insights into their subjects to more people than would have been possible via a regular BPRS meeting. The show ran from January 2015 to June 2015, and was nominated for 'Best Academic Radio Show' by the annual Society & Media award show organised by the Union of Brunel Students.

Members of the Media Association Society.

                           

Each show was structured into three sections. In the first section I would communicate research news from around the world, which I would express in different languages. In addition to English, news could also be broadcasted in Spanish, French, German, or Italian. The second section was the interactive part, in which I would have a guest, who would normally be a research student with interest in sharing their research topic and progress with the audience. This section would therefore take the shape of an interview. The third section would consist of me talking on a certain issue from a critical point of view in form of a monologue.

Article on the first postgrad radio show at Brunel in the student newspaper 'Le Nurb'.

With this type of science communication I literally gave research students a voice through which research students could become vocal about any matters that were relevant to them and, which would help the audience understand how their research is important and can make a difference. The music played between each segment was eclectic in nature as it included various genres of music such as opera, folk, alternative and electronic rock, classical music, punk and live instrumental music from my instrument that is the Veena.

Inside the Brunel Radio Studio.

On different occasions I would have different societies be guest during the second segment, in which they would tell everyone what their society was about, and promote their activities. During special weeks I would organise unique collaborations between societies. Specifically, during the celebration of 'Go Green' Week, for example, we extended the show by an hour to a two-hour 'Go Green' Week special. It featured for the first time a live debate. The motion was “This House believes that climate change is a myth” and represented a collaboration between the BPRS that I was president of, and the Brunel Debating Society, of which I was immediate past president.

After the live debate during 'Go Green' Week.

Apart from doing science communication online or live on air, I later got the opportunity to work with like-minded people on science communication by founding the 'Bright Brains' newsletter, which would appear in print as part of the British Neuroscience Association (BNA) Bulletin. The motivation behind me founding 'Bright Brains' was to show the BNA how to listen to its young members and give them a voice. It was essential to me that the BNA Bulletin appropriately represented the views and insights of BNA student members from different regions of the UK as well as from different fields within Neuroscience. With 'Bright Brains' I aimed to illustrate how this could be achieved via a student-led support system for students and with students. To me it was therefore a truly special experience when I saw the BNA embrace an idea that I had as a student and turn it into a reality. This was the beginning of the 'Bright Brains' newsletter with me as the founding editor-in-chief.

The 'Bright Brains' logo.

Now nearly half a decade later I am proud to say that 'Bright Brains' has become a very popular feature within the Bulletin, and has so far produced a total of 112 print articles, 54 online articles with the help of 83 contributors as writers, 74 as editors and 50 involved in design and production. I can therefore now confidently say that ‘Bright Brains’ has visibly shown the BNA by example how to help students become vocal about their views, and how the BNA can continue to support its young members in the near future. With that in mind, it is clear that the mission of ‘Bright Brains’ has been accomplished.

The success of ‘Bright Brains’ shows that the BNA does listen to its student members and I am sure that the organisation will continue to do so in the future. Specifically, I am proud to say that the BNA will continue in their bulletin to have a student section that I proposed, and that ‘Bright Brains’ paved the way to the new student section called ‘Brain Insights’ that is now managed by a group of editors who are currently studying neuroscience. By continuing the student section the BNA is clearly heading in the right direction, and has recognised hereby the importance of not only its young members’ contributions but also the relevance of science communication, and the role it plays in positioning Neuroscience as a science that can help change lives for the better. 'Bright Brains' is a good example of how science communication can have everyone in a country involved.

An example of the first two pages of the 'Bright Brains' Newsletter.

Is there a way through which anyone with no student background could get involved in and contribute to science communication? The answer is YES! With unique ideas such as Neuropoetry it is possible to engage those in science communication who are not currently in school or university or professionally involved in science. I recently did a couple of neuropoetry workshops at charities based on my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry'. One of them was at Headway East London at which attendees got to share information about their neurological conditions with others while learning about poetry at the same time. Based on the poetry and neuroscience-related material that I provided during the neuropoetry workshop they then did create and recite their own poetry about the brain and the mind. Such events can also be held at other public places such as libraries and bookshops. On National Poetry Day, it was, for example, my pleasure to recite from 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' at the Brook's bookshop in Pinner.

Reciting from my book 'Multilingual Neuropoetry' at Brook's bookshop during National Poetry Day.

With the help of Neuropoetry therefore science communication can reach all kinds of people, and with multilingual neuropoetry it will be possible to enthuse an international audience all over the world about the mind and the brain. If you are interested in holding a neuropoetry workshop near you, please get in touch! It is thus clear that science communication can take on different shapes and forms, and it is up to you to choose the one that works for you!