This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0–10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article–noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child’s cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article–noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items.
Introduction: Research on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) in monolingual and bilingual speakers has shown significant differences in L1 versus L2 phonemic perception. In this study, we examined whether the MMN response is sensitive to the differences between L1, L2 and L3/Ln.
Methods: We compared bioelectrical brain activity in response to changes in pairs of vowels produced in three different languages. Specifically, multilingual participants listened to selected vowel contrasts in their L1 Polish, L2 English and L3/Ln Norwegian presented within the passive-oddball paradigm.
Results: Results revealed that the MMN was modulated by language: we observed significant differences between L2 English and L3/Ln Norwegian as well as between L1 Polish and L3/Ln Norwegian. For L3/Ln Norwegian, the MMN response had a lower amplitude when compared with L2 English and L1 Polish.
Discussion: Such findings suggest that foreign language status (i.e., L2 vs. L3/Ln) modulates early auditory processing.