More Like this

1. Language of instruction affects language interference in the third language

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921000043  

   Tomoschuk, Brendan ; Duyck, Wouter ; Hartsuiker, Robert J. ; Ferreira, Victor S. ; Gollan, Tamar H. ( August 2021 , Bilingualism: Language and Cognition)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Applied linguistic work claims that multilinguals’ non-native languages interfere with one another based on similarities in cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. Two experiments explored how trilinguals regulate control of native- and non-native-language words. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals in a monitoring task. Participants decided if phonemes were present in the target language name of a picture, phonemes of non-target language translations resulted in longer response times and more false alarms compared to phonemes not present in any translation (Colomé, 2001). The second language (English) interfered more than the first (Dutch) when trilinguals monitored in their third language (French). In Experiment 2, 95 bilinguals learned an artificial language to explore the possibility that the language from which a bilingual learns a third language provides practice managing known-language interference. Language of instruction modulated results, suggesting that learning conditions may reduce interference effects previously attributed to cognitive factors. 

   more » « less
2. Language Shift, Language Technology, and Language Revitalization: Challenges and Possibilities for St. Lawrence Island Yupik

   Schwartz, Lane ( December 2019 , Proceedings of the International Conference Language Technologies for All (LT4All): Enabling Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism Worldwide)

   St. Lawrence Island Yupik is a polysynthetic language indigenous to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, and the Chukotka Peninsula of Russia. While the vast majority of St. Lawrence Islanders over the age of 40 are fluent L1 Yupik speakers, rapid language shift is underway among younger generations; language shift in Chukotka is even further advanced. This work presents a holistic proposal for language revitalization that takes into account numerous serious challenges, including the remote location of St. Lawrence Island and Chukotka, the high turnover rate among local teachers, socioeconomic challenges, and the lack of existing language learning materials. 

   more » « less
3. GeoLM: Empowering Language Models for Geospatially Grounded Language Understanding

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.317  

   Li, Zekun ; Zhou, Wenxuan ; Chiang, Yao-Yi ; Chen, Muhao ( January 2023 , Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Humans subconsciously engage in geospatial reasoning when reading articles. We recognize place names and their spatial relations in text and mentally associate them with their physical locations on Earth. Although pretrained language models can mimic this cognitive process using linguistic context, they do not utilize valuable geospatial information in large, widely available geographical databases, e.g., OpenStreetMap. This paper introduces GeoLM, a geospatially grounded language model that enhances the understanding of geo-entities in natural language. GeoLM leverages geo-entity mentions as anchors to connect linguistic information in text corpora with geospatial information extracted from geographical databases. GeoLM connects the two types of context through contrastive learning and masked language modeling. It also incorporates a spatial coordinate embedding mechanism to encode distance and direction relations to capture geospatial context. In the experiment, we demonstrate that GeoLM exhibits promising capabilities in supporting toponym recognition, toponym linking, relation extraction, and geo-entity typing, which bridge the gap between natural language processing and geospatial sciences. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/geolm. 

   more » « less
4. How Good Does This Sound? Examining Listeners’ Second Language Proficiency and Their Perception of Category Goodness in Their Native Language

   https://doi.org/10.3390/languages8010043  

   Nagle, Charlie ; Baese-Berk, Melissa M. ; Diantoro, Carissa ; Kim, Haeun ( March 2023 , Languages)

   Language learners often transfer the sounds and prosody of their native language into their second language, but this influence can also flow in the opposite direction, with the second language influencing the first. Among other variables, language proficiency is known to affect the degree and directionality of cross-linguistic influence. However, little is known about how second language learning affects listeners’ perception of their native language. To begin addressing this gap, we examined the relationship between learners’ second language proficiency and their category goodness ratings in their native language. Thirty-nine English-speaking learners of Spanish listened to English words that began with voiced and voiceless stop consonants and were asked to rate how well the word represented the intended word on a 5-point scale. To create a voicing continuum, we manipulated the voice onset time of the word-initial stop in each target item from 125 ms of prevoicing to 100 ms of aspiration, in 25 ms steps. Proficiency did not affect the perception of voiced targets, but both proficiency and L2 stop production affected the perception of voiceless targets. 

   more » « less
5. Age of sign language acquisition has lifelong effect on syntactic preferences in sign language users

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025420958193  

   Krebs, Julia ; Roehm, Dietmar ; Wilbur, Ronnie B. ; Malaia, Evie A. ( September 2020 , International Journal of Behavioral Development)

   null (Ed.)

   Acquisition of natural language has been shown to fundamentally impact both one’s ability to use the first language and the ability to learn subsequent languages later in life. Sign languages offer a unique perspective on this issue because Deaf signers receive access to signed input at varying ages. The majority acquires sign language in (early) childhood, but some learn sign language later—a situation that is drastically different from that of spoken language acquisition. To investigate the effect of age of sign language acquisition and its potential interplay with age in signers, we examined grammatical acceptability ratings and reaction time measures in a group of Deaf signers (age range = 28–58 years) with early (0–3 years) or later (4–7 years) acquisition of sign language in childhood. Behavioral responses to grammatical word order variations (subject–object–verb [SOV] vs. object–subject–verb [OSV]) were examined in sentences that included (1) simple sentences, (2) topicalized sentences, and (3) sentences involving manual classifier constructions, uniquely characteristic of sign languages. Overall, older participants responded more slowly. Age of acquisition had subtle effects on acceptability ratings, whereby the direction of the effect depended on the specific linguistic structure. 

   more » « less