The current study explores the interplay between central and peripheral processes in second language (L2) handwriting among bilinguals with diverse orthographic backgrounds. Our investigation delves into the cross-linguistic transfer effect in Spanish–English and Chinese–English bilinguals, emphasizing lexical frequency and phoneme-grapheme (P-O) consistency in spelling-to-dictation and immediate copying tasks. Results reveal that the interaction between central and peripheral processes in L2 handwritten production is shaped by the bilinguals' native language (L1) orthographic characteristics. Spanish–English bilinguals exhibited sensitivity to P-O consistency and the spread of this effect from central to peripheral processes throughout both tasks. Conversely, Chinese–English bilinguals showed heightened sensitivity to lexical frequency during orthographic planning and motor execution, particularly in the immediate copying task. In a broader context, these findings suggest that the parallel and cascading coordination of the L2 writing system is modulated by cross-linguistic variations. The implications of our findings hold relevance for handwriting production and bilingualism research.

Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor/actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince/princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

Despite its prominent use among bilinguals, psycholinguistic studies reported code-switch processing costs (e.g., Meuter & Allport, 1999). This paradox may partly be due to the focus on the code-switch itself instead of its potential subsequent benefits. Motivated by corpus studies on CS patterns and sociopragmatic functions of CS, we asked whether bilinguals use code-switches as a cue to the lexical characteristics of upcoming speech. We report a visual world study testing whether code-switching facilitates the anticipation of lower-frequency words. Results confirm that US Spanish–English bilinguals (n = 30) use minority (Spanish) to majority (English) language code-switches in real-time language processing as a cue that a less frequent word would ensue, as indexed by increased looks at images representing lower- vs. higher-frequency words in the code-switched condition, prior to the target word onset. These results highlight the need to further integrate sociolinguistic and corpus observations into the experimental study of code-switching.

In studies of bilingual word recognition with masked priming, first language (L1) primes activate their second language (L2) translation equivalents in lexical decision tasks, but effects in the opposite direction are weaker (Wen & van Heuven, 2017). This study seeks to clarify the relative weight of stimulus-level (frequency) and individual-level (L2 proficiency, L2 exposure/use) factors in the emergence of asymmetrical priming effects. We offer the first data set where L2 proficiency and L1/L2 exposure/use are simultaneously investigated as continuous variables, along with word frequency. While we replicate the asymmetry in priming effects, our data provide useful insights into the factors driving L2–L1 priming. These fall almost exclusively under the category of stimulus-level factors, with L2 exposure/use being the only experiential variable to show considerable influence, although complex interactions involving L2 proficiency and word frequency are also present. We discuss the implications of these results for models of bilingual lexical processing and for the appropriate measurement of experiential factors in this type of research.

In two lexical-decision experiments, we investigated the processing of figurative and literal meaning in idioms. Dutch native and German–Dutch bilingual speakers responded to target words presented after a minimal context idiom prime (e.g., ‘He kicked the bucket’). Target words were related to the figurative meaning of the prime (‘die’), the literal word at the end of the idiom (‘water’), or unrelated to both (‘face’). We observed facilitation in RTs for figuratively and literally related targets relative to unrelated targets for both participant groups. A higher frequency idiom-final word caused inhibition in responses to the literally related target for native speakers, indicating competition between the idiom as a whole and its literal word constituents. Native speakers further showed sensitivity to transparency of the idiom's meaning and the plausibility of the idiom as a literally interpretable sentence. The results are interpreted in terms of available L1/L2 idiom comprehension models, and a more detailed processing account for literal and idiomatic sentence interpretation.

Proficient bilinguals demonstrate slower lexical retrieval than comparable monolinguals. The present study tested predictions from two main accounts of this effect, the frequency-lag and competition hypotheses. Both make the same prediction for bilinguals but differ for trilinguals and for age differences. 200 younger or older adults who were monolingual, bilingual, or trilingual performed a picture naming task in English that included high and low frequency words. Naming times were faster for high than for low frequency words and, in line with frequency-lag, group differences were larger for low than high frequency items. However, on all other measures, bilinguals and trilinguals performed equivalently, and lexical retrieval differences between language groups did not attenuate with age, consistent with the competition view.

This paper introduces a novel captioning method, partial and synchronized captioning (PSC), as a tool for developing second language (L2) listening skills. Unlike conventional full captioning, which provides the full text and allows comprehension of the material merely by reading, PSC promotes listening to the speech by presenting a selected subset of words, where each word is synched to its corresponding speech signal. In this method, word-level synchronization is realized by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, dedicated to the desired corpora. This feature allows the learners to become familiar with the correspondences between words and their utterances. Partialization is done by automatically selecting words or phrases likely to hinder listening comprehension. In this work we presume that the incidence of infrequent or specific words and fast delivery of speech are major barriers to listening comprehension. The word selection criteria are thus based on three factors: speech rate, word frequency and specificity. The thresholds for these features are adjusted to the proficiency level of the learners. The selected words are presented to aid listening comprehension while the remaining words are masked in order to keep learners listening to the audio. PSC was evaluated against no-captioning and full-captioning conditions using TED videos. The results indicate that PSC leads to the same level of comprehension as the full-captioning method while presenting less than 30% of the transcript. Furthermore, compared with the other methods, PSC can serve as an effective medium for decreasing dependence on captions and preparing learners to listen without any assistance.

This article presents EHME, the frequency dictionary of Basque structure, an online program that enables researchers in psycholinguistics to extract word and nonword stimuli, based on a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of Basque words. The database consists of 22.7 million tokens, and properties available include morphological structure frequency and word-similarity measures, apart from classical indexes: word frequency, orthographic structure, orthographic similarity, bigram and biphone frequency, and syllable-based measures. Measures are indexed at the lemma, morpheme and word level. We include reliability and validation analysis. The application is freely available, and enables the user to extract words based on concrete statistical criteria1, as well as to obtain statistical characteristics from a list of words2.

According to the nonce borrowing hypothesis (NBH), “[n]once borrowings pattern exactly like their native counterparts in the (unmixed) recipient language” (Poplack & Meechan, 1998a, p. 137). Nonce borrowings (Sankoff, Poplack & Vanniarajan, 1990, p. 74) are “lone other-language items” which differ from established borrowings in terms of frequency of use and recognition. Lone other-language items are singly occurring words from the “donor” language which are preceded and followed by words or phrases from the “recipient” language. Whether such other-language words belong only to the donor language (and are classed as codeswitches) or to both the donor and the recipient language (and are classed as borrowings) is both a theoretical and a practical issue. Poplack & Meechan (1998a) suggest that this question can be settled by measuring the linguistic integration of donor-language words, so that infrequent donor-language words which behave like their recipient-language counterparts are categorised as (nonce) borrowings. This suggests that frequency of use need play no role in the extent to which other-language items are linguistically integrated into the recipient language. We challenge this hypothesis with an analysis of soft mutation on English-origin verbs in Welsh, which shows that integration is related to frequency.

Episodic memory encoding and distinctiveness detection were examined using event-related potentials (ERP) in a single-trial word list learning paradigm with free recall following distraction. To manipulate distinctiveness, encoding of high- and very low-frequency words was contrasted. Amplitudes of the N400 and late positive component (LPC) were larger for low- than for high-frequency words, and ERPs were more positive for subsequently recalled than not recalled words. This subsequent memory effect was dissociated from the correlates of distinctiveness by polarity for the N400 and by time course for the LPC and dissociable into two effects. The data suggest that the first subsequent memory effect, which occurred for both word categories, is more directly related to episodic memory formation, whereas the second effect, which occurred for high-frequency words only, is related to processes influencing episodic encoding success indirectly.