Eve Higby

Students in the Multilingualism Lab presented their in-progress research projects at the 2021 Virtual Cal State East Bay Student Research Symposium. Their recorded presentations can be found below.

Bilingual aphasia: This study involved an 8-week naming treatment study of two Spanish-English bilinguals with aphasia. The patients were given treatment in English and were assessed in both English and Spanish in order to investigate whether treatment gains would transfer to the untreated language, Spanish. This is part of Kana Lopez’s Master’s thesis.

Lopez, K., Vasquez, A. S., Soto, J., Tollast, A., Gravier, M., & Higby, E.  Cross-language Treatment Effects in Bilinguals with Aphasia. https://youtu.be/uRSjaMt0p5c

Bilingual language development: This study tested 30-32-month-old toddlers from Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking homes to examine the influence of Mandarin on the acquisition of plural and verbal morphology in toddlers exposed to Mandarin and English. This is part of Ogechi Okeke and Jennifer Do’s Master theses.

Okeke, O., Do, J., Higby, E., & Nicholas, K.  Language Development in Mandarin-English Bilingual Toddlers. https://youtu.be/LHQs0PyGfS0

Sulcal morphology: This study examines individual differences in brain morphology, particularly the paracingulate sulcus in the anterior cingulate cortex. The length of this sulcus in each hemisphere is being indexed and will be entered into a correlational analysis with cognitive behavioral tasks to examine whether paracingulate length is associated with certain types of cognitive skills.

Sanchez, A., Crosby, M., & Higby, E.  The Significance of Brain Morphology for Cognitive Abilities. https://youtu.be/DxwzhW17w-E

Last week I was in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to attend the International Symposium on Bilingualism and present some of the research that I have been conducting at UC Riverside with one of my fabulous undergraduate students, Paulina Vasquez-Rocha. The conference was a wonderful place to meet more bilingualism researchers and catch up with old friends.

In this study, we explored whether bilinguals exhibit proactive or reactive control of the dominant language when naming a block of pictures in the non-dominant language. We found evidence for proactive control, meaning that bilinguals inhibited the language as a whole rather than specific (interfering) lexical items. The full abstract is below.

Abstract:

When bilinguals plan speech in one of their two languages, the other language is active and potentially competing for production. Bilinguals may inhibit the dominant language (L1) to produce words in the non-dominant language (L2) (Misra et al., 2012). In this experiment we asked whether bilinguals inhibit specific words that might interfere in speaking L2 (local inhibition) or whether they inhibit the L1 lexicon as a whole (global inhibition). Two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals completed a picture naming task in which they first named pictures in separate blocks in L1, then L2, then L1. One group named the same pictures across all the blocks. The other group named novel pictures in the L2. If the L1 is inhibited globally, we expect to see the same patterns for both groups. However, if specific items are suppressed, repetition priming for those who named novel pictures in the L2 is expected. In a final block, they named pictures in both languages depending on a cue. In mixed blocks, switching into the L1 is more costly than switching into the L2 (Meuter & Allport, 1999). However, it is unclear from previous research how that inhibition is affected by prior naming. Data from 59 participants suggest that L1 suppression is global. L1 naming was similarly affected by repeated and novel items. Naming in the mixed-language block was slower in English; however, Spanish naming was faster in the mixed block than in the single-language block for repeated pictures. This pattern suggests that naming the same pictures in both languages led to a greater L2 repetition advantage for the language-mixing condition, but no advantage for the L1. Thus, the scope of L1 inhibition is not limited to the specific items retrieved. Instead, bilinguals inhibit the L1 lexicon as a whole when planning L2 speech.

This past week a bunch of my students presented at three undergraduate research conferences, and they did AMAZING. They’ve been working really hard on various research projects over the past year, and they finally got to show off some of that hard work. Click on the poster titles below to download a copy of their posters!

The Scope of Inhibitory Control in Bilingualism

Paulina Vasquez-Rocha and Abdiel Lopez-Martinez

Paulina gave two oral presentations on her work: one at the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium and another at the Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference at UCLA. Abdiel presented a poster at the R’PSYC Research Conference at UCR.

*Vasquez-Rocha, P., Higby, E., & Kroll, J. F. (2019, May). The scope of dominant-language inhibition in bilingualism. Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, Los Angeles, CA.

*Vazquez-Rocha, P., Higby, E., & Kroll, J.F. (2019, May). How do bilinguals plan the language they intend to speak? University of California, Riverside Research Symposium, Riverside, CA.

*Lopez-Martinez, A., Vasquez-Rocha, P., Higby, E., & Kroll, J. F. (2019, May). Inhibition in bilinguals’ language production. R’PSYC Undergraduate Research Conference, Riverside, CA.

Using verbal fluency to understand the impact of language use and self-rated proficiency on lexical access in bilingualism

Charles Lai, Arlyn Ballesteros, Sam King, and Mariam Morkos

Charles and Arlyn presented their poster at both the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium and the R’PSYC Undergraduate Research Conference.

*Lai, C., *Ballesteros, A., *King, S., *Morkos, M., Takahesu-Tabori, A., Higby, E., & Kroll, J. F. (2019, May). Using verbal fluency to understand the impact of language use and self-rated proficiency on lexical access in bilingualism. University of California, Riverside Research Symposium, Riverside, CA.

Effects of implicit word retrieval in bilinguals

Monica Martinez, Ziomara Machado, and Daniela Ayon

Monica and Daniela presented their project at the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium.

*Martinez, M., *Ayon, D., *Machado, Z., Higby, E., & Kroll, J. F. (2019, May). Effects of implicit word retrieval in bilinguals. University of California, Riverside Research Symposium, Riverside, CA.

Subjective task difficulty in two languages and its effect on task ordering

Guadalupe Mendoza and Samantha Ramos

Samantha and Guadalupe went to Beijing, China, for two months this past winter to conduct their study on native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. They presented some of their findings from that project at both the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium and the R’PSYC Undergraduate Conference.

*Mendoza, G., *Ramos, S., Higby, E., & Rosenbaum, D. (2019, May). Subjective task difficulty in two languages and its effect on task ordering. University of California, Riverside Research Symposium, Riverside, CA.

Investigating the relationship between paracingulate sulcus patterns and executive functions

Gold Osita-Ogbonnaya, Madeline Finnegan, Melissa Rico, and Faredun Dungore

Gold and Madeline presented their project at the R’PSYC Undergraduate Conference.

*Osita-Ogbonnaya, G., *Finnegan, M., *Rico, M., *Dungore, F., Atagi, N., Rupp, M., Macbeth, A., & Higby, E. (2019, May). Investigating the relationship between paracingulate sulcus patterns and executive functions. R’PSYC Undergraduate Research Conference, Riverside, CA.

Understanding the effects of predicción in bilinguals

Jose Calderon, Blanca Bautista, Berenice Velazquez, and Natalia Rzeslawski-Gamboa

Jose and Blanca presented their project at the UCR Undergraduate Research Symposium.

*Calderon, J., *Bautista, B., *Velazquez, B., *Rzeslawski-Gamboa, N., Higby, E., Zirnstein, M., & Kroll, J. F. (2019, May). Understanding the effects of predicción in bilinguals. University of California, Riverside Research Symposium, Riverside, CA.

Fall is always full of conference-going. It’s an exciting time to share some of your latest findings and get feedback on projects that are in progress. It’s also very stimulating – cool new research happening everywhere, catching up with old friends and networking with others.

This year I presented some research at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in New Orleans, LA, and at the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

The project that I presented on at this meeting is an analysis that I have been working on with three research assistants in New York. We have been analyzing verbal fluency data from Spanish-English bilinguals in New York City. These bilinguals completed semantic and phonemic fluency tasks in both Spanish and English. We are analyzing their data in order to gain insight into their lexical organization and/or their lexical access. We are comparing their data to two control groups: English monolinguals and Spanish monolinguals (actually, native Spanish speakers with limited English proficiency) living in New York City. In order to characterize their performance, we are looking at number of words produced, average lexical frequency of the words they produced (in other words, are the words mostly highly frequent words in the language or do they also dig into their low-frequency vocabulary?), as well as the percent of words produced that are cognates. Cognates are words that overlap in both form and meaning in two languages, like bicycle and bicicleta in English and Spanish.

What we have found so far is that highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals produced just as many words during the Spanish trials as Spanish controls and the words they produced were about the same level of word frequency. We included both early and late bilinguals, so this group included bilinguals who were born and raised in New York. However, there were some group differences for English trials. Early bilinguals showed the same patterns as English controls. However, late bilinguals produced fewer responses than English controls on the semantic fluency task and their responses were higher frequency (on average). Late bilinguals also produced a higher proportion of cognate on the phonemic task in English. Interestingly, the early bilinguals were in between the English controls and late bilinguals on all of these measures, suggesting more of a graded effect than a strict difference for late bilinguals.

We also investigated the characteristics of responses given over the course of the trial. Typically, responses in the beginning of the trial are high-frequency and responses decrease in frequency as the speaker searches deeper and deeper into their lexicon for exemplars. An odd pattern that we observed was that early bilinguals did not show this characteristic pattern on the phonemic fluency task. Their responses showed no relationship between frequency and response number (which was used to represent the time course). We are currently investigating why this pattern shows up for the early bilinguals by looking at some background variables that may differentiate them from late bilinguals or may produce interesting variability within the group.

You can find copies of the Psychonomics poster and the CAMP presentation on my ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Eve_Higby/research.