In July, Melinda Fricke and Megan Zirnstein each received prestigious Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship grants from the National Science Foundation for their work in the language sciences. Drs. Fricke and Zirnstein are postdocs with Penn State’s Center for Language Science and they study bilingualism. This is the first time researchers at Penn State have received one of these Fellowships, which target interdisciplinary research. The awards provide funding support for two years.
In Dr. Zirnstein’s project, “Prediction in Language Processing: Bilingualism, Aging, and Cognitive Control,” she examines the ability of bilingual speakers to predict which words will come next in a line of text, and how their brains mediate conflict when their predictions are wrong.
“When text is written very well, you start to expect certain words and can predict what words are likely to come next,” she said. “When those words do come, it’s easy to process them because your brain has done the work ahead of time. We want to see how well bilinguals do this with a second language.”
Using electroencephalography—the recording of electrical activity along the scalp, while participants are reading, Dr. Zirnstein can see what words cause spikes in brain activity—evidence that the brain is working harder to process information. When an unexpected word occurs, she is then able to determine how difficult it was for the person to process.
Dr. Zirnstein’s past research has shown that Chinese-English bilinguals who are better at resolving conflict in other types of tasks—for example, pushing a button quickly in response to sequences of letters on a screen, and adapting that response when the sequence suddenly changes—experience less difficulty when predictions are disconfirmed while they are reading. Those who readily handled an unexpected letter in a sequence also adapted quickly to unexpected words when reading in their second language.
“It can be really difficult to test how one person processes two languages,” Zirnstein said. “This award is going to help me do just that, and extend my work to other bilingual groups and learners of a second language.”
Some research suggests that bilinguals’ ability to perform well on control or conflict-resolution tasks may be a result of constant practice with negotiating conflict between two or more languages. This ability has been shown to persist into later adulthood and may protect against some age-related cognitive declines. Dr. Zirnstein’s project will extend to elderly populations to see if having better conflict-resolution ability influences age-related changes in reading ability.
Dr. Zirnstein studies brain waves, but Dr. Fricke examines sound waves and the ways bilinguals find words in memory. Termed “lexical retrieval,” this process involves the brain’s ability to locate the word a speaker wants to say. Many words are used so infrequently that it can be a challenge for a speaker to retrieve them. We sometimes say these words are “on the tips of our tongues.”
In her project, “The Behavioral and Neural Basis of Codeswitching: Bilingual Speech, Executive Control, and Language Processing,” Dr. Fricke examines conversational speech and identifies when bilinguals slow down their speech to find the word they are looking for.
“When it’s hard to plan what word to say next, you slow down. That makes intuitive sense,” she said. “Normally you’re only conscious of lexical retrieval when things go very wrong. By looking at very small changes in speech rate, however, I can study a range of retrieval difficulty and understand better how we turn the idea of the word into articulation or speech.”
Another area of the project will focus on bilinguals’ difficulty in switching languages. By studying audio recordings of the natural speech of bilinguals, Dr. Fricke aims to identify the influence each language has on the other when a speaker is using both languages in a conversation — or “codeswitching.” For example, by studying the audio of a conversation between two bilinguals, Dr. Fricke hopes to identify acoustic cues that signal when a speaker is about to switch from one language to the other.
By looking at the acoustics of speech, Dr. Fricke is also learning about cross-linguistic interactions and their effect on bilingual accents. Dr. Fricke is particularly interested in small changes in speakers’ accents, which may not be detected by the human ear, but can be evident when acoustic equipment is used.
“If you are bilingual, let’s say English-Spanish, and you are switching back and forth,” said Dr. Fricke, “you are going to start to sound accented. This is a way one language can affect the other. I can use a change in accent as a clue for when you are about to switch languages during a conversation.”
The Center for Language Science has been supported by the College of the Liberal Arts, the Children, Youth, and Families Consortium, and the College of Health and Human Development, as well as by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.