The 40th Language Lunch
Date: 2013-11-28
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
A study about inhibitory control in bilinguals.
Marta Tessmann Bandeira,; PPLS; None
This study examines bilingualism and executive functions from the perspective of dynamical systems, and aims to compare the performance of multilingual children evaluated in 2008 and the same participants four years later, on tasks involving executive function – inhibitory control and attention. When a bilingual change the language in use by another – code-switching, the control required to inhibit the language that is not being used during a specific part of the linguistic interaction, can improve their performance in various tasks requiring executive control. Therefore, the increase in the executive function purchased during the code-switching can also help stimuli control inhibition during nonverbal tasks. The aim of this study is to observe if multilinguals keep the same ability concerning inhibitory control and attention from childhood into teenage years.rnThe participants were 20 multilingual individuals, first tested when they were about 8-10 years old, and then retested four years after. The language spoken by the participants were Pomeranian (L1), German (L1) and BP (L2). To test the executive function Simon task was used as a replication of Bialystok (2003) study. The Simon task involves executive functions, namely inhibitory control and attention. In the task used, stimuli are presented with different target features and in different positions. Participants are instructed to respond only to target features (for example, by pressing the right or the left key of a computer or serial box according to whether the stimulus is a red or a blue square) but to ignore the position of the stimulus on the screen. Accuracy and reaction times were measured, as well as the Simon Effect. The results of reaction time and accuracy in the task suggest that multilinguals keep their abilitiy to perform the task.
Linguistic and cognitive-conceptual approaches to metaphor: Evidence from bilinguals and monolinguals
Christoph Hesse,; PPLS; None
The poster presents results from my experiments and corpus analysis rnconcerning to research questions:rnrn(1) *What is the nature of the mechanisms used in metaphor rncomprehension?* (a) specific to language (Relevance Theory, Graded rnSalience, Grice) or (b) not specific to language (Conceptual Metaphor rnTheory). Prediction: If the Conceptual Metaphor Theory is correct, rncultures in close linguistic contact should have similar inventories rnof conceptual mappings used in metaphor comprehension and rninstantiations of them should be intelligible cross-linguistically.rnrn(2) The inferential process is contextual through-and-through, but *do rnbilinguals make use of context in the same way that monolinguals do?* rnPrediction: If given contextual information is relevant – i.e. it rnyields cognitive effects / is informative / contributes some new piece rnof information – then all speakers should make use of it.rn
Alien intelligence
Joe Dewhurst,; PPLS; None
I argue that sophisticated embodied robots will employ conceptual schemes that are radically different to our own, resulting in what might be described as “alien intelligence”. Here I introduce embodied robotics and conceptual relativity, and consider the implications of their combination for the future of artificial intelligence. This argument is intended as a practical demonstration of a broader point: that our interaction with the world is fundamentally mediated by the conceptual frameworks with which we carve it up.rn
Temporal structure in a gesture production task
Marieke Schouwstra,; PPLS; None
Objectives: In recent studies where naive participants were asked to convey information about simple events using gesture and no speech, it was found that participants bypass the rules of their native language when structuring their gesture strings. Consequently, these studies can tell us something about natural dispositions for sequencing information that might have played a role in the emergence of language (Goldin-Meadow et al., 2008).rnrnSchouwstra (2012) has shown that the structuring principles that play a role in this process are semantic in nature: semantic organization possibly predated syntactic rules. Moreover, the lab results can be related to the semantic patterns observed in natural communication systems that arise in the absence of linguistic conventions: restricted linguistic systems (RLSs). Examples of such systems are rnhome sign and Basic Variety, the language of unsupervised adult second language learners.rnrnMy goal is to replicate one of the semantic patterns observed in RLSs in the lab: that of temporal displacement. In existing languages, tense/aspect information is complex, and generally expressed through inflection on the verb. In RLSs, the expression of temporal displacement is relatively simple: the information that an event takes place at some other time than now is communicated by placing a temporal adverbial before an utterance.rnrnrnMethods: In a gesture production task, I asked participants to convey information about events (shown in pictures) that do not take place now.rnrnResults: A gesture production study with sixteen Dutch participants revealed that they use the same strategy as that observed in RLSs. Moreover, simple propositional information is never interrupted by temporal information.rnrnConclusions: These results strengthen the conceptual connection between RLSs and the gesture production task, and suggest a semantics-governed picture of the emergence of language, in which complex information was initially conveyed by adding information to the periphery of simple rnutterances.rn
