Short-Term Memory for Auditory Temporal Patterns and Meaningless Sentences Predicts Learning of Foreign Word Forms

Neural Representations of Non-native Speech Reflect Proficiency and Interference from Native Language Knowledge

Learning to process speech in a foreign language involves learning new representations for mapping the auditory signal to linguistic structure. Behavioral experiments suggest that even listeners that are highly proficient in a non-native language experience interference from representations of their native language. However, much of the evidence for such interference comes from tasks that may inadvertently increase the salience of native language competitors. Here we tested for neural evidence of proficiency and native language interference in a naturalistic story listening task. We studied electroencephalography responses of 39 native speakers of Dutch (14 male) to an English short story, spoken by a native speaker of either American English or Dutch. We modeled brain responses with multivariate temporal response functions, using acoustic and language models. We found evidence for activation of Dutch language statistics when listening to English, but only when it was spoken with a Dutch accent. This suggests that a naturalistic, monolingual setting decreases the interference from native language representations, whereas an accent in the listener's own native language may increase native language interference, by increasing the salience of the native language and activating native language phonetic and lexical representations. Brain responses suggest that such interference stems from words from the native language competing with the foreign language in a single word recognition system, rather than being activated in a parallel lexicon. We further found that secondary acoustic representations of speech (after 200 ms latency) decreased with increasing proficiency. This may reflect improved acoustic-phonetic models in more proficient listeners.Significance Statement Behavioral experiments suggest that native language knowledge interferes with foreign language listening, but such effects may be sensitive to task manipulations, as tasks that increase metalinguistic awareness may also increase native language interference. This highlights the need for studying non-native speech processing using naturalistic tasks. We measured neural responses unobtrusively while participants listened for comprehension and characterized the influence of proficiency at multiple levels of representation. We found that salience of the native language, as manipulated through speaker accent, affected activation of native language representations: significant evidence for activation of native language (Dutch) categories was only obtained when the speaker had a Dutch accent, whereas no significant interference was found to a speaker with a native (American) accent.

Working Memory Models and Measures in Language and Bilingualism Research: Integrating Cognitive and Affective Perspectives

Although emotional or affective working memory (WM) is quite well established in general psychology, not much research has looked into its potential implications for the language sciences and bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) research until recently. To fill this gap, this paper aims to propose that WM has not just cognitive implications, but its affective dimension may also make complementary and unique contributions to language and bilingualism/SLA research. Towards this end, we first briefly synthesize the cognitive views of WM conceptions and assessment procedures in the current language sciences and bilingualism/SLA research. Next, we turn to discuss the theoretical models and assumptions of affective WM and explore their theoretical implications for bilingualism/SLA research based on emerging empirical evidence. Then, we propose a conceptual framework integrating cognitive and affective WM perspectives and further provide guidelines for designing affective WM span tasks that can be used in future affective WM–language research, focusing on the construction procedures of several emotion-based affective WM span tasks (e.g., the emotional reading span task, the emotional operation span task, and the emotional symmetry span task) as examples. Overall, we argue that affective feelings are also an integral part of the mental representations held in WM and future research in the language sciences and bilingualism/SLA should incorporate both cognitive and affective WM dimensions.