Katy Borodkin

Accurate identification and pronunciation of nonnative speech sounds can be particularly challenging for adult language learners. The current study tested the effects of a brief musical training combined with transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on speech perception and production in a second language (L2). The sample comprised 36 native Hebrew speakers, aged 18–38, who studied English as L2 in a formal setting and had little musical training. Training encompassed musical perception tasks with feedback (i.e., timbre, duration, and tonal memory) and concurrent tDCS applied over the left posterior auditory-related cortex (including posterior superior temporal gyrus and planum temporale). Participants were randomly assigned to anodal or sham stimulation. Musical perception, L2 speech perception (measured by a categorical AXB discrimination task) and speech production (measured by a speech imitation task) were tested before and after training. There were no tDCS-dependent effects on musical perception post-training. However, only participants who received active stimulation showed increased accuracy of L2 phoneme discrimination and greater change in the acoustic properties of L2 speech sound production (i.e., second formant frequency in vowels and center of gravity in consonants). The results of this study suggest neuromodulation can facilitate the processing of nonnative speech sounds in adult learners.

Bilinguals are more successful than monolinguals in novel language learning due to the transfer of prior learning strategies and experiences with two languages. The extent of such transfer may depend on the similarity between previously acquired languages and a novel language. This hypothesis was tested in relation to vocabulary learning in elementary school children. The sample included 10 Hebrew-Yiddish speakers, 10 Hebrew-English speakers, and 10 monolingual Hebrew speakers who learned ancient Aramaic as part of religious studies. Hebrew-Yiddish speakers, for whom both languages were similar to Aramaic, recalled more Aramaic words than both monolingual speakers and Hebrew-English speakers, for whom only one language was similar to Aramaic. There was no statistically significant difference between Hebrew-English and monolingual speakers. The advantage in the Hebrew-Yiddish group remained significant even after controlling for background variables, such as years of maternal education, phonological short-term memory, and vocabulary size in Hebrew. These findings provide evidence that previously acquired languages may facilitate vocabulary learning in a novel language if they are similar to the novel language.

Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions: Previous studies in pairs of typologically distant languages showed that hemispheric processing of metaphoric expressions differs in a native versus second language. The current research explored this finding in a pair of typologically close languages, Arabic and Hebrew. Design/methodology/approach: Forty-six Arabic native speakers who were proficient in Hebrew (second language; 30 women, aged 19–28) participated in a divided visual field (DVF) experiment. They were presented with conventional metaphors, literal expressions, and unrelated word pairs and asked to indicate whether the word pairs formed a meaningful expression. Participants were tested in spoken Arabic, literary Arabic, and Hebrew in separate blocks. Data and analysis: Mean reaction times and accuracy were analyzed using repeated-measures three-way analysis of variance, with language, visual field, and expression type as independent variables. Findings/conclusions: In contrast to previously reported findings, a left-hemisphere advantage or a bilateral pattern of processing was observed for conventional metaphors in both varieties of Arabic and in Hebrew, suggesting similar hemispheric processing in native and second language. Originality: Metaphor processing is examined in a pair of typologically close languages. Significance/implications: Our findings (in a pair of typologically close languages) differ from those previously reported in pairs of less similar languages, suggesting a modulatory role of language similarity in hemispheric processing of second-language metaphors.

This study assessed the effects of maternal smartphone use on mother–child interaction. Thirty-three Israeli mothers and their 24- to 36-month-old toddlers (16 boys) from middle-high socioeconomic status participated in three within-subjects experimental conditions: maternal smartphone use, maternal magazine reading, and uninterrupted dyadic free-play. The mothers produced fewer utterances, provided fewer responses to child bids, missed child bids more often, and exchanged fewer conversational turns with their children when engaged with a smartphone or printed magazines compared to uninterrupted free-play. The quality of maternal responsiveness was also decreased. These findings suggest maternal smartphone use compromises mother–child interaction, which given smartphone ubiquity in daily life may have negative effects on child development in various domains, including language, cognition, and socioemotional regulation.

Background: Persons with aphasia often show variability in language behavior. It is thus a common practice to evaluate their skills on multiple occasions, for research and clinical purposes. This repeated probing usually relies on identical testing materials, sometimes leading to practice effects. As an alternative, different but comparable testing materials used on successive occasions can be applied. Aims: To evaluate simultaneously performance stability on comparable testing forms, the less common method, in relation to performance stability on identical forms. Methods & Procedures: We tested five persons with non-fluent aphasia using three comparable testing forms that were administered twice. Naming accuracy in an action picture naming task and overall productivity, informativeness, grammaticality, and lexical diversity in two tasks eliciting connected speech (a personal narrative and a picture sequence) were assessed. Outcomes & Results: Pearson’s correlation coefficients were calculated among the three comparable testing forms administered at each testing time. Pearson’s correlation coefficients were also calculated between identical forms administered twice. We then contrasted the correlation ranges across identical and comparable forms. With a few exceptions, performance was highly correlated (r > .80) among identical forms and among comparable forms. Conclusions: Our preliminary findings suggest that the reliability of both testing methods is similar, which may facilitate future use of comparable forms, a currently less common method in aphasia research. This testing approach can be particularly useful where practice effects are likely to occur.

Background: Language mixing in bilingual speakers with aphasia has been reported in a number of research studies, but the reasons for the mixing and whether it reflects typical or atypical behaviour has been a matter of debate. Aims: In this study, we tested the hypothesis that language mixing behaviour in bilingual aphasia reflects lexical retrieval difficulty. Methods & procedures: We recruited a Hebrew-English bilingual participant with mild-moderate non-fluent agrammatic aphasia and assessed his languages at three timepoints. We analysed the participant’s Hebrew and English production for retrieval during single-word naming, sentences, and discourse, and identified all instances of language mixing. Outcomes & Results: We found that there was a greater frequency of language mixing during production of more difficult lexical items, namely the post-morbidly less proficient language (compared to the more proficient language), function words (compared to content words), and single-word naming (compared to retrieval in the context of connected speech tasks), but not for verbs (compared to nouns). Conclusions: In this bilingual participant with non-fluent aphasia, language mixing behaviour closely resembles lexical retrieval difficulty. Thus, we suggest that bilingual speakers with aphasia may mix their languages as a strategy to maximise communication.

Current findings from intervention in bilingual aphasia are inconclusive regarding the extent to which levels of language proficiency and degree of linguistic distance between treated and non-treated languages influence cross-language generalisation and changes in levels of language activation and inhibition following treatment. In this study, we enrolled a 65-year-old multilingual speaker with aphasia and administered treatment in his L1, Dutch. We assessed pre- and post-treatment performance for seven of his languages, five of high proficiency and two of lower proficiency. We asked whether treatment in L1 would generalise to his other languages or increase interference among them. Forty hours of treatment were completed over the course of five weeks. Each language was tested three times at pretreatment and at post-treatment. Testing included measures of narrative production, answering questions, picture description and question generation. Dependent measures examined language efficiency, defined as Correct Information Units (CIUs)/min, as well as language mixing, defined as proportion of code-mixed whole words. We found that our participant’s improved efficiency in Dutch was mirrored by parallel improvement in the four languages of high proficiency: English, German, Italian and French. In contrast, in his languages of lower proficiency, Norwegian and Spanish, improved efficiency was limited. An increase in code-mixing was noted in Spanish, but not in Norwegian. We interpret the increased code-mixing in Spanish as indication of heightened inhibition following improvement in a language of close linguistic proximity, Italian. We conclude that an interaction of language proficiency and linguistic similarity affects cross-language generalisation following intervention in multilingual aphasia.