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Bilingual child and adult processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences
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Poster A33 in Poster Session A - Sandbox Series, Thursday, October 24, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 4
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Claire Kong-Johnson1, V. Andrew Stenger1, Jonas Vibell1,2, Kamil Deen1; 1University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2John A. Burns School of Medicine
Language is full of ambiguity, from word-level ambiguity (e.g., ‘play’ can be what children often do, or it can be a theatrical performance) to sentence-level ambiguity (e.g., “the man saw the woman with binoculars” can have two meanings, depending on who has the binoculars). When we hear an ambiguous sentence and unintentionally get the wrong meaning, it requires that we revise our interpretation. That revision is cognitively demanding and requires a great deal of cognitive resources (Pozzan & Trueswell, 2016; Trueswell et al., 1999). On top of this, bilinguals must also deal with potential cross-language interference due to parallel activation of both languages. This has led to the proposal that bilingual brains are adapted to handle conflict more efficiently than monolingual brains (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). We aim to test this proposal by having Hawaiian-English bilingual children (ages 5-10) and adults perform two syntactic ambiguity resolution tasks while in an MR scanner. The sentences will be presented auditorily and, in one task, the participant must indicate if the action they witness on the screen matches the sentence they heard, and in the other task, which of two pictures better matches the sentence. In addition to the fMRI scans, we will be collecting structural and diffusion weighted images to address the following broad goals: 1) have bilingual children acquired the ability to successfully resolve syntactic ambiguities at an earlier age than their monolingual counterparts, 2) are the brain networks that bilingual children and adults recruit different, and possibly less widespread, than monolinguals, and 3) do bilinguals show differences in white matter diffusivity and gray matter volume in the conflict resolution network. In adults, we expect to see an interaction between ambiguity and bilingualism in conflict resolution and integration networks, like LIFG, ACC, dlPFC and their connections, in the form of less widespread activation for bilinguals when dealing with ambiguity. Further, we expect that bilingual children will exhibit more adult-like activation of this network at an earlier age compared to age-matched monolinguals. Therefore, in this sandbox series poster, we will present behavioral results from three syntactic ambiguity tasks as well as pilot fMRI data from two syntactic ambiguity tasks. These preliminary data will be discussed within theories of syntactic ambiguity resolution as well as bilingual language processing. Our interest in Hawaiian-English bilinguals is a conscious effort to broaden our understanding about different types of bilinguals and highlight an understudied and endangered language to contribute to its revitalization. Our hope is that the results of this research will encourage parents in Hawai’i to commit to raising their children bilingual. The power of English is so overwhelming that unless there is deep commitment from both parents (and their extended family and support network), children invariably end up being English-dominant. Therefore, we would like to show families that if they decide to contribute to Hawaiian revitalization by raising their children bilingual in Hawaiian, their hard work will be worth it.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism, Language Development/Acquisition