Dia: dijous 23 de març del 2023
Hora: 12.00 h
Lloc:  sala de reunions 55.309 - Campus del Poblenou - UPF

Resum:
Humans have an exquisite ability to recognize language patterns, generalize them to new instances, and predict what an interlocutor will say next. I have investigated language and cognitive factors affecting monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ ability to recognize auditory associations. I have examined the role of prosody (lexical stress; syllabic structure), language experience (L1 transfer; language proficiency; language use), age of acquisition (early vs. late 
bilinguals), anticipatory experience (non-interpreter vs. interpreter learners), and cognitive individual differences (working memory). I have examined these factors in semantic associations (semantically related/unrelated words: papa ‘potato’ - papá ‘dad’), morphological associations (present-past tense suffixes based on a stressed/unstressed initial syllable: firma ‘‘(s)he signs’ - firmó ‘(s)he signed’), and morphosyntactic associations (grammatical gender agreement: el/su libro/camión viejo/*vieja ‘the/his-her book MASC /truck old MASC /old *FEM ).

Participants looked at two words on the screen while listening to a sentence and clicked on the word they heard. Eye-tracking data revealed that monolinguals, heritage speakers, and advanced—but not beginning---learners looked at target words above chance before hearing the ending. Monolinguals fixated on targets more and earlier than heritage speakers and L2 learners. Bilinguals predictions benefited from higher language proficiency, higher language use, extensive anticipatory experience acquired through simultaneous interpretation, lower cognitive load (less lexical competitors), and higher working memory, but not from earlier AoA or L1-L2 similarity. We discuss these findings considering linguistic, processing, prediction, and neurocognitive language models.