College of Behavioral & Social Sciences
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Item Stuttering or not? Analysis of language exposure effects on fluency assessment(2024-05-03) Ahluwalia, Seetal; Bernstein Ratner, Nan; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Ortiz, JoséLanguage exposure is hypothesized to impact bilingual speakers’ levels of typical and stuttering-like disfluency. The current study examined the relationship between English language exposure before school age and bilingual children’s speech fluency during an English task. The sample included 33 Spanish-English bilingual children from the English-MiamiBiling corpus at CHILDES. Participants were asked to narrate Mayer’s (1969) wordless picture book, Frog, Where Are You? Children who spoke only Spanish in the home were referred to as “MonoSpanHome” while children who spoke English and Spanish at home were referred to as “BilingHome.” It was hypothesized that children in the “MonoSpanHome” group would be more disfluent than their “BilingHome” peers. It was found that the “MonoSpanHome” participants had an increased number of typical disfluencies than their “BilingHome” counterparts. However, the number of stuttering-like disfluencies and total overall disfluency was similar between the two groups.Item Examining Narrative Language in Early Stage Parkinson's Disease and Intermediate Farsi-English Bilingual Speakers(2022) Lohrasbi, Bushra; Faroqi-Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study aimed to examine procedural aspects of language (grammaticality, syntactic complexity, regular past tense verb production), verb use, and the association between motor-speech, language abilities, and intelligibility in Early Stage Parkinson's Disease (PD) and Intermediate Farsi-English Bilingual Speakers (L2). Ullman’s Declarative-Procedural Model (2001) provided this study with a dual-mechanism model that justified a theoretical comparison between these two populations. Twenty-four neurologically healthy native speakers of English, twenty-three Parkinson’s Disease participants, and thirteen bilingual Farsi-English speakers completed three narrative picture description tasks and read the first three sentences of the Rainbow Passage. Language samples were transcribed and analyzed to derive measures of morphosyntax and verb use, including grammatical accuracy, grammatical complexity, and proportions of regular past tense, action verbs and light verbs. The results did not show any evidence of morphosyntactic or action verb deficit in PD. Neither was there any evidence of a trade-off between morphosyntactic performance and severity of speech motor impairment in PD. L2 speakers had lower scores on grammatical accuracy and a measure of morphosyntactic complexity, but did not differ from monolingual speakers on measures of verb use. Overall, these results show that language abilities (morphosyntax and verb use) are preserved in early stage PD. This study replicates the well-documented finding that morphosyntax is particularly challenging for late bilingual speakers. The results did not support Ullman’s Declarative-Procedural (2001) hypothesis of language production in Parkinson’s Disease or L2 speakers.Item The What and Where of Control in Bilingual Language Switching(2018) Shell, Alison; Slevc, L. Robert; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Speakers of multiple languages must somehow express intended concepts using the appropriate lexical item in the intended language while not producing lexical items from another language that could equally well express the intended concepts. Thus bilingual speakers must presumably manage competition from these items active in their multiple languages in order to successfully communicate. However, it remains unclear where in the process of language production the competition exists, and what mechanisms are used to resolve the competition and successfully produce language. This dissertation set out to more robustly examine the implications of the prominent idea that domain general inhibitory control is used to inhibit the non-target language. To begin, I re-analyzed existing results from studies correlating measures of language switching and inhibitory control using a Bayesian approach. This reanalysis found that much of the previous literature either provides evidence against a relationship between a domain general inhibitory control task and language switching, or finds little to no evidence for such a relationship. Across two experiments, I then assess the role of domain-general inhibitory control in bilingual lexical access using a dual-task design–combining a language switching task with a concurrent task taxing domain-general cognitive control–as well as an individual differences component in the relatively well-powered and pre-registered Experiment 2. In these experiments, I break down the complex process of inhibitory language control into possibly dissociable levels of control (control at the language level and control at the item level) and assess potentially dissociable types of control (proactive control used to bias and monitor for conflict more broadly, and reactive control used for dynamically selecting between languages at a trial by trial level). There was evidence against a role of reactive control in switching between languages at both the language and item level. There was some evidence, however, suggesting a potential role for proactive control or monitoring in a language switching context. Correlations between language switching costs and domain-general measures of inhibitory control suggest that language proficiency and flexibility of control may modulate the ability to reactively control language in a language switching context, however the specificity of these findings demonstrate the complexity of this relationship, in line with the mixed findings in the current literature.Item Linguistic Influences on Disfluencies in Typically-Developing French-English Bilingual Children(2018) Azem, Andrea Sabrije; Ratner, Nan; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The connections among language proficiency, language complexity, and fluency have been well-researched in both typical and atypical monolingual populations. Though previous work indicates that bilingual individuals often demonstrate different patterns of disfluency in each of their languages, how or why this happens is largely unknown. Relationships among fluency, language proficiency, and language complexity were examined using the narrative and conversational speech samples of 9 French-English bilingual children. Mean length of utterance in words (MLUw) and percent grammatical utterances (PGU) were shown to strongly relate to rates of total disfluency. The proportion of disfluent function words across samples differed significantly from the proportion of disfluent content words, although rates of disfluency on individual parts of speech did not differ significantly between French and English. Further work is necessary in order to better understand the extent to which language proficiency and linguistic complexity interact and affect disfluency across bilingual populations.Item Representative Data and Psychometric Properties of Short Version of the Korean-English Bilingual Aphasia Test(2018) Lee, Seongsil; Faroqi Shah, Yasmeen; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Previous studies investigating the psychometric properties of the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT) have found variable results. This study sought to investigate performance of high proficiency Korean-English (KE) bilinguals on Korean and English BAT and examine the equivalency of test difficulty across the two languages. A total of thirty KE bilinguals took the Korean-BAT, English-BAT, and Korean-English Translation Test (KETT). Their performance was evaluated and compared across two languages. Results showed that KE bilinguals performed above 80% on all subtests, however, they displayed different performance between Korean and English in three subtests. Item analyses found eighteen items with whose accuracy was below 80% and sixteen item pairs with unequal performance across the two languages. These results support the importance of testing psychometric properties of BAT and developing normative data for each language. Based on the representative data, recommendations for further modification of the BAT and a new ceiling criterion are proposed.Item THE ROLE OF DOMAIN GENERAL COGNITIVE MECHANISMS IN BILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRODUCTION(2015) Shell, Alison Ruppel; Slevc, L. Robert; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bilingual language production is widely believed to be a competitive process. Bilinguals may manage this competition by relying on inhibiting one language while speaking in the other. However, it remains unclear if this process relies on domain general inhibitory mechanisms, and, if so, when and where during language production control is applied. The current study investigates these issues by experimentally manipulating demand on inhibitory control using tasks requiring domain-general inhibitory control, during a language switch task paradigm. If inhibitory control is required in language switching and is a domain general, inhibitory demand during the switch trials is predicted to make the switch more difficult. Across the experiments, switching costs were not exacerbated when inhibitory control was taxed; if anything, language switching was less costly during inhibition-demanding trials. These findings question the role of inhibitory control in language switching and suggest revising the current models of language control in bilingual production.Item Interactions between language experience and cognitive abilities in word learning and word recognition(2014) Morini, Giovanna; Newman, Rochelle S; Hearing and Speech Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)There has been much recent interest in the finding of a "bilingual advantage". That is, bilingualism confers benefits on various non-linguistic cognitive measures, particularly executive control. Yet bilingual children often face a different situation when it comes to language: their profile often negatively diverges from that of monolinguals, potentially leading to classification as language-disordered. This, in turn, contributes to public policies that discourage bilingualism. Most studies have examined ways in which bilinguals are better or worse than monolinguals. However, it is possible that bilinguals simply approach tasks differently, or weight information sources differently. This leads to advantages in some tasks and disadvantages in others. This dissertation seeks a principled understanding of this conflict by testing the hypothesis that differences in linguistic exposure and age alter how individuals approach the problem space for learning and comprehending language. To become proficient in a language, learners must process complex acoustic information, while relying on cognition to accomplish higher thought processes like working memory and attention. Over the course of development, individuals rely on these skills to acquire an impressive vocabulary, and to recognize words even in adverse listening conditions (e.g., when speech is heard in the presence of noise). I present findings from four experiments with monolingual and bilingual adults and toddlers. In adulthood, despite showing advantages in cognitive control, bilinguals appear to be less accurate than monolinguals at identifying familiar words in the presence of white noise. However, the bilingual "disadvantage" identified during word recognition was not present when listeners were asked to acquire novel word-object relations that were trained either in noise or in quiet. Similar group differences were identified with 30-month-olds during word recognition. Bilingual children performed significantly worse than monolinguals, particularly when asked to identify words that were accompanied by white noise. Unlike the pattern shown by adults, when presented with a word-learning task, monolingual but not bilingual toddlers were able to acquire novel word-object associations. Data from this work thus suggest that age, linguistic experience, and the demands associated with the type of task all play a role in the ability of listeners to process speech in noise.