Bilinguals apply language-specific grain sizes during sentence reading

SUBTLEX-CY: A new word frequency database for Welsh

We present SUBTLEX-CY, a new word frequency database created from a 32-million-word corpus of Welsh television subtitles. An experiment comprising a lexical decision task examined SUBTLEX-CY frequency estimates against words with inconsistent frequencies in a much smaller Welsh corpus that is often used by researchers, the Cronfa Electroneg o'r Gymraeg (CEG), and three other Welsh word frequency databases. Words were selected that were classified as low frequency (LF) in SUBTLEX-CY and high frequency (HF) in CEG and compared with words that were classified as medium frequency (MF) in both SUBTLEX-CY and CEG. Reaction time analyses showed that HF words in CEG were responded to more slowly compared to MF words, suggesting that SUBTLEX-CY corpus provides a more reliable estimate of Welsh word frequencies. The new Welsh word frequency database that also includes part-of-speech, contextual diversity, and other lexical information is freely available for research purposes on the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/9gkqm/.

Does bilingualism come with linguistic costs? A meta-analytic review of the bilingual lexical deficit

A series of recent studies have shown that the once-assumed cognitive advantage of bilingualism finds little support in the evidence available to date. Surprisingly, however, the view that bilingualism incurs linguistic costs (the so-called lexical deficit) has not yet been subjected to the same degree of scrutiny, despite its centrality for our understanding of the human capacity for language. The current study implemented a comprehensive meta-analysis to address this gap. By analyzing 478 effect sizes from 130 studies on expressive vocabulary, we found that observed lexical deficits could not be attributed to bilingualism: Simultaneous bilinguals (who acquired both languages from birth) did not exhibit any lexical deficit, nor did sequential bilinguals (who acquired one language from birth and a second language after that) when tested in their mother tongue. Instead, systematic evidence for a lexical deficit was found among sequential bilinguals when tested in their second language, and more so for late than for early second language learners. This result suggests that a lexical deficit may be a phenomenon of second language acquisition rather than bilingualism per se.

Order among chaos: Cross-linguistic differences and developmental trajectories in pseudoword reading aloud using pronunciation Entropy

In this work we propose the use of Entropy to measure variability in pronunciations in pseudowords reading aloud: pseudowords where participants give many different pronunciations receive higher Entropy values. Monolingual adults, monolingual children, and bilingual children proficient in different European languages varying in orthographic depth were tested. We predicted that Entropy values will increase with increasing orthographic depth. Moreover, higher Entropy was expected for younger than older children, as reading experience improves the knowledge of grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs). We also tested if interference from a second language would lead to higher Entropy. Results show that orthographic depth affects Entropy, but only when the items are not strictly matched across languages. We also found that Entropy decreases across age, suggesting that GPC knowledge becomes refined throughout grades 2-4. We found no differences between bilingual and monolingual children. Our results indicate that item characteristics play a fundamental role in pseudoword pronunciation variability, that reading experience is associated with reduced variability in responses, and that in bilinguals' knowledge of a second orthography does not seem to interfere with pseudoword reading aloud.