Monika S. Schmid

Bilinguals tend to have slower response times in picture naming than monolinguals in both their first and second languages. Naming speed interacts with item frequency, suggesting that the bilingual disadvantage may be due to less frequent exposure to each language. We measure response speed in a Picture Naming and a Picture-Word-Interference paradigm among 98 bilinguals and 83 monolinguals, looking for interactions between word frequency and frequency of use of both L1 and L2. We confirm previous findings that monolinguals outperform bilinguals, and that the bilingual disadvantage is stronger for low- than for high-frequency items. While immersed bilinguals seem to have an advantage in L2 naming over non-immersed speakers, self-reported use of either language does not affect naming in either language, and the L1 is not affected by the immersed vs. non-immersed distinction. We conclude that frequency remains an elusive factor in bilingual development, and particularly in L1 attrition.

Vaccine hesitancy remains one of the greatest challenges for global health. Previous research has shown that the recruitment of rational processes is increased in hypothetical decision-making scenarios when the underpinning information is presented in a foreign language. We investigate whether vaccine campaigns could benefit from this Foreign Language Effect (FLE) in order to overcome vaccine hesitancy. We conceptually replicated a recent study on COVID-19 vaccine campaigns (Freeman et al. 2021) to assess whether information can more successfully reduce vaccine hesitancy when presented in a foreign language as well as how other factors, such as language proficiency, impact the FLE. Based on a survey of 436 participants, we conclude that there may be the potential to lower vaccine hesitancy among individuals with English as a foreign language by presenting information in English, rather than in their native language. Conversely, participants who are native speakers of English and negatively predisposed against the COVID-19 vaccine react more negatively to information they read in a foreign language compared to their native language.

The way we acquire a second language is fairly well understood. But how we lose our language skills - after leaving school, for example - is more of a mystery. Here, linguist Monika S. Schmid describes some of the problems encountered in quantitative investigations of second language attrition

Event-related potentials (ERPs) in the processing of grammatical violations typically investigate differences between natives and second language speakers by averaging the amplitude of a participant’s brain response in a pre-specified time window by condition. This approach suffers from the problem that time windows are defined arbitrarily, and that the result is sensitive to outliers as well as participant variation in latency. The latter is particularly problematic for studies on L2 processing. The size of the ERP response (i.e., amplitude difference) of an L2 speaker may not be the best indicator of near-native proficiency, either, with the consistency of the response potentially being a more valid indicator. We introduce a set of individual difference measures based on complete ERP waveforms using generalized additive modelling (GAM), extracted based on amplitude, area and peak effects. We illustrate the benefits of our method compared to the traditional Response Magnitude Index with data on the processing of grammatical gender violations in 66 Slavic L2 speakers of German and 29 German native speakers. One of our measures in particular appears to outperform the others in characterizing differences between natives and L2 speakers, and captures proficiency differences between L2 speakers: the ‘Normalized Modelled Peak’, reflecting the height of the (modelled) peak, normalized against the uncertainty of the modelled signal. This measure reflects peak robustness, that is, how reliable a P600 effect is found, largely independently of its latency in the P600 window. We discuss implications of our results and offer suggestions for future studies on L2 processing.

Language development is not unidirectional, with levels of proficiency and knowledge continually increasing or at least remaining stable: Reverse transfer and lack of exposure and use can, over time, cause changes away from the target system. The increasing interest in these phenomena, which are collectively known as “language attrition,” has led to the realization that bilingual development affects and changes all of the languages represented in the mind, not only the one that is being acquired. This chapter presents an overview of the development of attrition studies as a field and summarizes key insights and questions.

Instructed foreign language knowledge – that is, language skills acquired exclusively in the classroom without the benefit of any significant immersion experience – remains a vastly neglected area of studies on language learning in general and language attrition in particular. There is also little consideration of foreign language attrition and maintenance as a problem for policy or pedagogy.The present talk will give an overview of what is and what is not known about second language (L2) attrition at the present time. It will then present the results from a pilot project that will hopefully serve as the foundation for larger studies of instructed L2 attrition in future years.

Https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/amab006