Title: Miccio Travel Award 

Abstract: First presented in 2010, the Adele Miccio Memorial Travel Award was established as an opportunity for CLS graduate students to begin building a professional relationship with a senior scientist, through a lab visit or meetings at a conference. In this talk, Courtney Johnson Fowler will discuss her experiences as a Miccio Travel Award winner. In March 2014 Courtney travelled to Spain to visit Dr. Daniela Paolieri and the Language and Memory Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Granada. As part of her talk she will outline her dissertation research, explain why she chose to visit Dr. Paolieri, and detail how the travel award benefitted her as a researcher.

Title: Using ERPs to investigate the scope and time course of inhibition in bilingual speech. 

Abstract: Bilingualism has been hypothesized to place heightened demands on speech production. Speaking a second language (L2) is often effortful and thought to reflect the competition arising from the more dominant first language (L1). To date, very little research has directly examined the consequences of bilingualism for speech planning in the L1, although recent fMRI studies suggest that the neural substrates of speech production in the L1 may differ for bilinguals and monolinguals. One hypothesis about the source of L1 differences for bilinguals and monolinguals comes from ERP studies that have examined the time course of speech planning. These studies suggest that the L1 may be suppressed when bilinguals speak the L1 after speaking the L2. Critically, the time course over which suppression is observed is long, suggesting the presence of a global mechanism of inhibitory control. If bilinguals repeatedly inhibit the L1 to enable production in the L2, there may be consequences that then account for the observed fMRI differences. In this talk, I report a set of experiments that use ERPs to investigate the differences in the earliest stages of speech planning in the L1. These experiments ask three questions about speech planning: 1. Do L2 speakers and monolinguals differ in planning L1?; 2. Do L2 learners who are less proficient in the L2 and highly dominant in the L1 reveal the same differences that have been observed for proficient bilinguals?; and 3. When L2 speakers are required to produce L2 and then revert to L1, how extended are the consequences of L2 on L1 speech?

Title: Tracking multiple structures: an investigation of the primacy effect 

Abstract: A fundamental challenge of statistical learning is to determine whether variance observed in the input signals a change in the underlying structure. Interestingly, when learners encounter two consecutive inputs, they only learn the first structure unless exposure to the second is tripled or a contextual cue correlates with the change (Gebhart, Aslin, & Newport, 2009). In two experiments, we explored the conditions under which both structures can be acquired. We found that learners who switch to the second input immediately after mastering the first are more likely to learn both, whereas those who continue to receive input in the first structure are more likely to remain entrenched, exhibiting the primacy effect. Further, the ability to learn both structures correlates with performance on a Flanker task, suggesting that the first input may need to be inhibited to acquire the second structure. We relate our findings to real world learning and bilingualism.

Title: Time course of language selection in bilingual language production

Abstract: When bilinguals plan to speak in a given language, both of their languages are activated. However, cognitive control mechanisms effectively allow the target language to be selected during speech planning. In this talk, I address the questions of when the target language is selected and what factors influence the locus of language selection using behavioral and electrophysiological measures. A series of behavioral experiments with same and different script bilinguals demonstrate that script differences allow the bilingual to select the language of production at an earlier point in speech planning when they are perceptually available. In the next set of experiments, we have been examining the time course of cross-language activation and language selection with event-related potentials (ERPs). A critical result of the ERP experiments is that both languages are activated to the phonological level at least for same script bilinguals. These findings will be discussed in terms of models of bilingual word production.

Title: What does sentence comprehension tell us about bilingualism?: Evidence from fMRI and ERPs

Title: Morphosyntactic Processing, Cue Interaction, and the Effects of Instruction: An Investigation of Processing Instruction and the Acquisition of Case Markings in L2 German

Title: Distributional language learning: Mechanisms of category formation 

Abstract: In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in non-human animals as well. I will briefly review this literature and then discuss some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for any distributional learning mechanism to operate effectively within the linguistic domain. In particular, how does a naive learner determine the number of categories that are present in a corpus of linguistic input, and what distributional cues enable the learner to assign individual lexical items to those categories? Contrary to the hypothesis that distributional learning and category (or rule) learning are separate mechanisms, I will argue that these two seemingly different processes — acquiring specific structure from linguistic input and generalizing beyond that input to novel exemplars — actually represent a single mechanism. Evidence in support of this single-mechanism hypothesis comes from a series of artificial grammar-learning studies that not only demonstrate that adults can learn grammatical categories from distributional information alone, but that the specific patterning of distributional information among attested utterances in the learning corpus enables adults to generalize to novel utterances or to restrict generalization when unattested utterances are consistently absent from the learning corpus. Finally, I will discuss some recent findings on the neural correlates of statistical learning and the prospects that such fMRI and fNIRS data will clarify the mechanisms of language learning.

Title: Representing objects across time: language-mediated event representation. 

Abstract: Language is often used to describe the changes that occur around us – changes in either state (“I cracked the glass…”) or location (“I moved the glass onto the table…”). To fully comprehend such events requires that we represent the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of the object. But how do we represent these mutually exclusive states of a single object at the same time? I shall summarise a series of studies, primarily from fMRI, which show that we do represent such alternative states, and that these alternative states compete with one another in much the same way as alternative interpretations of an ambiguous word might compete. These studies also show that whereas the representations of distinct but similar objects (e.g. a glass and a cup) interfere with one another in proportion to their similarity, representations of the distinct states of the same object interfere in proportion to their dissimilarity. This interference, or competition, manifests in a part of the brain that has been implicated in resolving competition. Furthermore, activity in this area is predicted by the dissimilarity, elsewhere in the brain, between sensorimotor instantiations of the described object’s distinct states. I shall end with new data (still too hot to touch) whose interpretation is a first step towards a brain mechanism for distinguishing between object types, tokens, and token-states. 

[Prior knowledge of the brain is neither presumed, required, nor advantageous].