Using a translanguaging framework to examine language production in a trilingual person with aphasia

When language abilities in aphasia are assessed in clinical and research settings, the standard practice is to examine each language of a multilingual person separately. But many multilingual individuals, with and without aphasia, mix their languages regularly when they communicate with other speakers who share their languages. We applied a novel approach to scoring language production of a multilingual person with aphasia. Our aim was to discover whether the assessment outcome would differ meaningfully when we count accurate responses in only the target language of the assessment session versus when we apply a translanguaging framework, that is, count all accurate responses, regardless of the language in which they were produced. The participant is a Farsi-German-English speaking woman with chronic moderate aphasia. We examined the participant's performance on two picture-naming tasks, an answering wh-question task, and an elicited narrative task. The results demonstrated that scores in English, the participant's third-learned and least-impaired language did not differ between the two scoring methods. Performance in German, the participant's moderately impaired second language benefited from translanguaging-based scoring across the board. In Farsi, her weakest language post-CVA, the participant's scores were higher under the translanguaging-based scoring approach in some but not all of the tasks. Our findings suggest that whether a translanguaging-based scoring makes a difference in the results obtained depends on relative language abilities and on pragmatic constraints, with additional influence of the linguistic distances between the languages in question.

Differential impacts of natural L2 immersion and intensive classroom L2 training on cognitive control

The relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control has been controversial. We believe that the discrepant findings are likely driven by the complexities of the bilingual experience, which is consistent with the Adaptive Control Hypothesis. The current study investigates whether the natural language immersion experience and the classroom intensive language training experience have differential impacts on cognitive control. Among unbalanced Chinese-English bilingual students, a natural L2 (second language) immersion group, an L2 public speaking training group, and a control bilingual group without immersion or training experience were compared on their cognitive control abilities, with the participants' demographic factors strictly controlled. The results showed that the L2 immersion group and the L2 speaking group had faster speed than the control group in the Flanker task, whereas the L2 immersion group had fewer errors than the other two groups in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). These results generally provide evidence in favour of the Adaptive Control Hypothesis, specifying that natural L2 immersion and L2 public speaking training experiences are distinctively related to cognitive control. The current study is the first of its kind to link specific bilingual experiences (natural L2 immersion vs. intensive L2 public speaking) with different components of cognitive control.

Brief Report: Autistic Traits Predict Spectral Correlates of Vowel Intelligibility for Female Speakers

A growing body of research finds that neurotypical autistic traits are predictive of speech perception and language comprehension patterns, but considerably less is known about the influence of these traits on speech production. In this brief report, we present an analysis of vowel productions from 74 American English speakers who participated in a communicative speaking task. Results show higher autistic trait load to be broadly and inversely related to spectral correlates of vowel intelligibility. However, the statistical significance of this relationship is specific to autistic traits along the pragmatic communication dimension, and limited to female speakers.