Automatic Perceptual Simulation of First Language Meanings

Automatic perceptual simulation of first language meanings during second language sentence processing in bilinguals

Nikola Vukovic, John N.Williams
Presented by: Sarah Alas-Viana

Introduction:

This study's goal is determining whether the mental simulations of the brain are conscious or unconscious/automatic processes. In previous studies it was confirmed that the brain does perform mental simulations like perceptual and visual information (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002; Horton & Rapp,

2003; Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan, Stanfield, & Yaxley, 2002) as well as orientation (Stanfield & Zwaan, 2001), location (Bergen, Lindsay, Matlock, & Narayanan, 2007), visibility conditions (Horton & Rapp, 2003), and most surprising was movement condition and action direction (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). The researchers in this study realized that because bilinguals process L1 and L2 simultaneously, especially through the use of homophonous words, it provided the perfect opportunity to test this hypothesis, since the processing of L1 and L2 is an automatic process. It was also found that auditory perception correlates to auditory imagination (Halpern, Zatorre, Bouffard, & Johnson, 2004) and in a later study by Speer, Reynolds, Swallow, and Zacks (2009) a conclusion was reached in which hearing stories produces similar mental simulations. Previous studies were not able to determine if the mental representations that individuals received from perceiving sentences in various mediums, meant that these simulations in the brain were conscious or automatic. This was due to the fact, that the previous studies had only tested monolinguals.

The researchers predicted that if a bilingual individual processes both languages simultaneously and unconsciously, then in a test similar to the experimental design in Winter & Bergen (2012) originally done by Stanfield & Zwaan (2001), they surmised that metal simulations would be an automatic process, since homophones are processed by both languages in bilinguals. In this type of experimental design participants were faster processing images that correlated with sentence implied distance. This experiment could help to better understand the bilingual lexicon and the types of representations that are used while processing sentences.

METHODS (150-300 words)

There were 20 participants who were proficient (Dutch-English) bilingual speakers that were living in the United Kingdom at the time. There were originally 24, but 3 had to be taken out due to computer malfunction and 1 reported being slightly dyslexic on a survey taken after the study. The average age was 29.65 and the mean average, self-reported proficiency, on a 7-point likert scale was 6.4 for written proficiency and 6.3 for spoken proficiency. Twenty-four critically, low constraint, English sentences were used for the experiment. Each sentence contained an interlingual English-Dutch homophone that was strategically place at the end of the sentence. The sentences were created in pairs in which one sentence indicated that the homophonous word was close and the other sentence indicated that the homophonous word was far. The participants would only hear one of each pair of sentences, near or far. There were also pairs of control sentences created in which the setup was similar to sentences 1 and 2 in Table 1, except that the sentence image pairs did not correlate. In order to mask that researchers were testing for sensory simulation of distance another 72 sentences were created to act as fillers that focused on special position. The sentences were spoken to the participants. The participants were then place in a room with a computer screen and once they heard the sentence were then shown a picture of an object that was mentioned in the sentence. They were asked to say 'yes' if the image matched the sentence and 'no' if the image did not match. When the trial began participants looked at a blank screen. They were then showed a red fixation cross, during which the audio file containing the sentence was played. Once the audio was complete, a green fixation cross was shown and immediately the image was shown for the participant to give their response.

Table 1:

DISCUSSION (200-400 words)

This study's goal was to determine if the mental simulations conjured in the brain were automatic or conscious. The three-way interaction, stated previously in the results (Sentence, Picture and Target Word), provided researchers with more to go on in regards to theories of language. Participants in this study were responding quicker to sentences that implied closeness and were responding slower to sentences that implied distance. This helps us to confirm that there is activation and perceptual stimulation of the homophone L1 meaning when the sentence was stated in L2, meaning participants mentally simulated the sentential content and were strong enough to create a visual feature, in this case object permanence. This study can open a lot of doors in the field of psycholinguistics as well as began to question theories in linguistics. It has helped the researchers realize that much more can be learned from combining these fields together.       

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