Andrea Krott – författare

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing.The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including:How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined?Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity?Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain?How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage?This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.

The majority of the world’s children grow up learning two or more languages. The study of early bilingualism is central to current psycholinguistics, offering insights into issues such as transfer and interference in development. From an applied perspective, it poses a universal challenge to language assessment practices throughout childhood, as typically developing bilingual children usually underperform relative to monolingual norms when assessed in one language only. We measured vocabulary with Communicative Development Inventories for 372 24-month-old toddlers learning British English and one Additional Language out of a diverse set of 13 (Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Welsh). We furthered theoretical understanding of bilingual development by showing, for the first time, that linguistic distance between the child’s two languages predicts vocabulary outcome, with phonological overlap related to expressive vocabulary, and word order typology and morphological complexity related to receptive vocabulary, in the Additional Language. Our study also has crucial clinical implications: we have developed the first bilingual norms for expressive and receptive vocabulary for 24-month-olds learning British English and an Additional Language. These norms were derived from factors identified as uniquely predicting CDI vocabulary measures: the relative amount of English versus the Additional Language in child-directed input and parental overheard speech, and infant gender. The resulting UKBTAT tool was able to accurately predict the English vocabulary of an additional group of 58 bilinguals learning an Additional Language outside our target range. This offers a pragmatic method for the assessment of children in the majority language when no tool exists in the Additional Language. Our findings also suggest that the effect of linguistic distance might extend beyond bilinguals’ acquisition of early vocabulary to encompass broader cognitive processes, and could constitute a key factor in the study of the debated bilingual advantage.

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing.

The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including:

How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined? Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity? Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain? How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage?

This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.

The use of language is a fundamental component of much of our day-to-day life. Language often co-occurs with other activities with which it must be coordinated. This raises the question of whether the cognitive processes involved in planning spoken utterances and in understanding them are autonomous or whether they are affected by, and perhaps affect, non-linguistic cognitive processes, with which they might share processing resources. This question is the central concern of Automaticity and Control in Language Processing.

The chapters address key issues concerning the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic processes, including:

How can the degree of automaticity of a component be defined? Which linguistic processes are truly automatic, and which require processing capacity? Through which mechanisms can control processes affect linguistic performance? How might these mechanisms be represented in the brain? How do limitations in working memory and executive control capacity affect linguistic performance and language re-learning in persons with brain damage?

This important collection from leading international researchers will be of great interest to researchers and students in the area.