Scherger Anna-Lena, Urbanczik Gianna, Ludwigs Timon, Kizilirmak Jasmin M
Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Language & Communication, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany.
University of Hildesheim, Institute for Psychology, Neurodidactics & NeuroLab, Hildesheim, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Sep 16;12:717379. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717379. eCollection 2021.
The present pilot study investigated potential effects of early and late child bilingualism in highly proficient adult bilinguals. It has been shown that some early second language (eL2) speakers stagnate when it comes to complex linguistic phenomena and that they display subtle difficulties in adulthood. Therefore, we have chosen the complex structure of double object constructions. We investigate the long-term achievement in a combined-method approach using elicited production, explicit comprehension by sentence-picture matching and a measure of implicit linguistic knowledge, namely pupillometry. This eye tracking method is suitable for measuring implicit reactions of the pupils to unexpected or ungrammatical stimuli. For production, ditransitive structures were elicited by means of a game. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was conducted. Two pictures were shown on a monitor that were equal with respect to the involved objects, but the thematic roles of direct and indirect objects were interchanged. Items were controlled for length, gender, animacy, semantic likelihood and word order. Reaction times and accuracy scores were analyzed. To this end, = 18 bilingual adult speakers of German (+ another language, mean age: 26.5) with different ages of onset participated in this study and were compared to = 26 monolingual German adult speakers (mean age 23.9). All participants had a proficiency of German above 89% correct in placement and cloze tests. Results show fully comparable productive and comprehensive competencies in monolinguals and bilinguals including the reaction times in the sentence-picture matching task and a word order effect on the reaction times in both groups. In the pupillometry task, we found monolinguals and bilinguals to be sensitive to differing conditions with respect to grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. However, we find between group differences in pupil dilations in that bilinguals react differently to strong grammatical violations than monolinguals. These results are discussed with respect to the term of native speaker competence and the variation within both groups.
本试点研究调查了儿童早期和晚期双语对高度熟练的成年双语者的潜在影响。研究表明，一些早期第二语言（eL2）使用者在复杂语言现象方面会停滞不前，并且在成年后会表现出细微的困难。因此，我们选择了双宾结构的复杂结构。我们采用一种综合方法来研究长期成果，该方法包括诱发产出、通过句子-图片匹配进行明确理解以及一种隐性语言知识的测量方法，即瞳孔测量法。这种眼动追踪方法适用于测量瞳孔对意外或不符合语法的刺激的隐性反应。在产出方面，通过一个游戏诱发双及物结构。在理解方面，进行了句子-图片匹配任务。在显示器上展示两张图片，这两张图片在涉及的物体方面是相同的，但直接宾语和间接宾语的主题角色相互交换。对项目的长度、性别、生命性、语义可能性和词序进行了控制。分析了反应时间和准确率得分。为此，18名以德语为母语且掌握另一门语言（平均年龄：26.5岁）、不同起始年龄的成年双语者参与了本研究，并与26名以德语为母语的成年单语者（平均年龄23.9岁）进行了比较。所有参与者在安置和完形填空测试中德语的熟练程度都在89%以上。结果表明，单语者和双语者在产出和理解能力方面完全可比，包括句子-图片匹配任务中的反应时间以及两组中词序对反应时间的影响。在瞳孔测量任务中，我们发现单语者和双语者对语法和不符合语法的话语的不同条件都很敏感。然而，我们发现两组在瞳孔扩张方面存在差异，即双语者对严重语法违规的反应与单语者不同。我们根据母语者能力的概念以及两组内部的差异对这些结果进行了讨论。
