In therapeutic encounters, patients from different ethnic backgrounds are required to communicate their emotions, often in a state of distress, to therapists who may not share their idea of therapy, and who patients feel have not shared their experiences, which may have led to their mental health state (Barden and Williams, 2007; Tribe, 2014). Due to the non-proficiency in the English language, some of these patients may not be able to communicate with therapists or express their emotions as they do in their first languages (L1) (Kennedy, 2015, Pavlenko, 2006). This is because the emotion words used to describe their distress not only depend on the personal experience, but in fact the meaning of distress is often culturally linked to the language of sorrow, which tends to feel emotionally weaker when interpreted into a foreign language (Lx) (Bamberg, 1997; Costa, 2010). As a result, therapists may fail to connect with patients or misinterpret the meaning of their emotional expressions. Therefore, this paper focuses on exploring how Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni (PSY) patients in Sheffield, UK use language to articulate their emotions, the emotional words or phrases they use to describe their emotions and how culture and/or religious beliefs may influence the expressions of such emotions or affect patients’ engagement with therapy. A qualitative interpretive approach using qualitative data collection methods including participant observations and in-depth semi-structured interviews has been used in order to understand the meaning of the intercultural communication encounter.  Results showed that the use of physical complaints to express emotional distress amongst PSY patients centred mainly on the description of the heart and how it impacts both on the mind and body (Haque and Keshavarzi, 2014), which appears to be based on Islamic teaching and reflect on their personal identities (Haque and Kamil, 2012). Participants were also found to use idioms of distress and rhetorical strategies such as metaphors, Quranic verses, and analogies that were shaped by the traditional norms and cultural and religious practices of each group to communicate their emotions (Blenkiron, 2005; Tair and Edward, 2006). These lexical items, which were layered with culturally different meanings, were not always adequately interpreted or understood by therapists. These lexical items drew attention to the complexity of communicating the emotions in cross-cultural therapeutic encounters, in which the communication can be quite a difficult task to achieve between patients and therapists.

The expression of emotions and their cultural ties to Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni patients' views of the world in cross-cultural therapy

Learning new languages is a complex cognitive task involving both implicit and explicit processes. Batterink, Oudiette, Reber, and Paller (2014) report that participants with vs. without conscious awareness of a hidden semi-artificial language regularity showed no significant differences in grammar learning, suggesting that implicit/explicit routes may be functionally equivalent. However, their operationalizing of learning via median reaction times might not capture underlying differences in cognitive processes. In a conceptual replication, we compared rule-aware (n=14) and rule-unaware (n=21) participants via drift-diffusion modeling, which can quantify distinct subcomponents of evidence-accumulation processes (Ratcliff & Rouder, 1998). For both groups, grammar learning was manifested in non-decision parameters, suggesting anticipation of motor responses. For rule-aware participants only, learning also affected bias in evidence accumulation during word reading. These results suggest that implicit grammar learning may be manifested through low-level mechanisms whereas explicit grammar learning may involve more direct engagement with encoded target meanings.

Differences in implicit vs. explicit grammar processing as revealed by drift-diffusion modeling of reaction times

By re-evaluating Crow (2000)’s claim that “Schizophrenia [is] the price that Homo sapiens pays for language”, we suggest that displacement, the ability to refer to things and situations outside from here and now, partly realized through syntactic operation, could be related to the symptoms of schizophrenia. Mainly supported by episodic memory, displacement has been found in nonhuman animals, but more limited than that in humans. As a conserved subcortical region, the hippocampus plays a key role in episodic memory across species. Evidence in humans suggests that the parietal lobe and basal ganglia are also involved in episodic Memory. We propose that what makes human displacement more developed could rely on the better coordination between the hippocampus and the parietal lobe and basal ganglia. Given that all these areas taking part in language processing, displacement could have served as an interface between episodic memory and language.

Displacement and Evolution: A Neurocognitive and Comparative Perspective

Dividing attention by loading working memory is an effective method of probing the declarative and procedural underpinnings of linguistic knowledge. The current study explores WM/DA effects on four specific L2 domains: morphology (aspect versus case), syntax and semantics (collocations). We contrast performance of 68 learners of Polish as a foreign language (L1 Chinese) in a grammaticality judgement task in baseline and divided attention conditions. We found corroborating evidence for heightened dependency on declarative memory in early (A2) L2 learners across all linguistic categories and in both experimental conditions. While the lexical judgement of more advanced (B1) learners also proved vulnerable to secondary-task interference, introduction of additional cognitive load had a positive effect on participants’ grammatical judgement, yielding more accurate responses in the aspect category. These results point towards the need for pursuing a new line of inquiry into a potentially facilitative role of cognitive load on L2 learners’ grammatical processing.

The ‘know-what’ and the ‘know-how’: importance of declarative and procedural memory systems in the L2 learning of morphology, syntax and semantics

Co-speech gestures can enhance a listener’s understanding of a spoken message, yet children show a greater benefit of gesture than adults (Hostetter, 2011). We explore whether this effect may be driven by language proficiency, and in turn, by differences in how children visually attend to gesture when they are processing narratives in their stronger vs. weaker language. Bilingual children were shown narratives with scripted gesture in their stronger and weaker languages, while their visual attention was monitored. Memory for narratives was then assessed. Our findings suggest language proficiency does affect the degree to which children benefit from co-speech gesture – children showed a greater boost from co-speech gesture when processing narrative in their weaker language. Results also suggest that greater attention to gesture when processing ones’ weaker language may underlie this effect.

Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism

Previous studies have found that bilingual children receive different Give-Number task knower-levels across their languages as subset-knowers. However, recent work reveals that the reliability of Give-Number task is moderate for subset-knower levels. This raises the possibility that the differences found in knower-levels across bilinguals’ languages are explained by a lack of reliability of Give-Number. To address this possibility, we presented bilingual children with Give-Number and a subitizing task that they had to perform in both languages. If differences in knower-levels are due to true differences in children’s understanding of small numbers and not random noise, then differences in subitizing abilities should also be non-random. Data collection is still in progress, but preliminary planned analyses (N=13/64) revealed no differences in subitizing abilities across languages, based on knower-levels classification. We discuss implications of these findings on knowledge transfer across bilinguals’ languages.

Subitizing Abilities of Bilingual Subset-Knowers

To convey meaning, language relies on hierarchically organized, long-range relationships spanning words, phrases, sentences, and discourse. As the distances between elements in language sequences increase, the strength of the long range relationships between those elements decays following a power law. This power-law relationship has been attributed variously to long-range sequential organization present in language syntax, semantics, and discourse structure. However, non-linguistic behaviors in numerous phylogenetically distant species, ranging from humpback whale song to fruit fly motility, demonstrate similar long-range statistical dependencies. Therefore, we hypothesized that long-range statistical dependencies in speech may occur independently of linguistic structure. To test this hypothesis, we measured long-range dependencies in speech corpora from children (aged 6 months -- 12 years). We find that adult-like power-law statistical dependencies are present in human vocalizations prior to the production of complex linguistic structure. These linguistic structures cannot, therefore, be the sole cause of long-range statistical dependencies in language.

Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition

The question of whether bilingual language experience confers a cognitive advantage remains open. Controversy arises from assertions that putative advantages can instead be explained by differences in culture, socioeconomic class, or immigration status, as well as the classification of bilingual experience as a fixed variable rather than a random effect. The present study addresses these issues by assessing the impact of variability in English (L2) language experience on executive function in a group of Mandarin-English speakers (n = 41) from Shenzhen. Participants reported on demographic details, language history, perceived stress, and performed a Simon task online. Data were analysed using Linear Mixed Effects (LME) models to test for individual differences on Simon task performance. Results showed higher levels of L2 proficiency were associated with reduced Simon effects, suggesting a cognitive advantage.

Internet-based Assessment of an Inhibitory Control Advantage in Bilingual Chinese High School Students

Children and adults show preferences for native speakers and judge them to be more credible sources of information than non-native speakers. Previous research with children has attributed this bias to a preference for in-group members. The present study investigated the role of processing fluency on children’s social judgements. Children were shown two speakers (one with a native accent and the other with a non-native accent) relaying a message from another individual. They were then asked to make credibility and social judgements about the speakers and their messages. Children were also asked a processing fluency question, and a question about the speakers’ comprehension of the original message. Responses to the processing fluency question and question about the speakers’ comprehension predicted credibility judgements, but did not predict preference. These findings suggest that processing fluency may play a role in developing biases towards non-native accented speakers. Implications are discussed.

Broken Telephone: Children's Judgments of Messages Delivered by Non-Native Speakers are Influenced by Processing Fluency

We investigated how the language background (L1) of bilinguals influences the representation and use of the second language (L2) through computational models. With the essays part from The International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), we compared variables indicating syntactic complexity in their L2 production to predict L1. We then trained neural language models based on BERT to predict the L1 of these English learners. Results showed the systematic influence of L1 syntax properties on English learners' L2 production, which further confirmed integrations of syntactic knowledge across languages in bilingual speakers. Results also found neural models can learn to represent and detect such L1 impacts, while multilingually trained models have no advantage in doing so.

Language representations in L2 learners: Toward neural models

Language is multimodal: non-linguistic cues, such as prosody, gestures and mouth movements, are always present in face-to-face communication and interact to support processing. In this paper, we ask whether and how multimodal cues affect L2 processing by recording EEG for highly proficient bilinguals when watching naturalistic materials. For each word, we quantified surprisal and the informativeness of prosody, gestures, and mouth movements. We found that each cue modulates the N400: prosodic accentuation, meaningful gestures, and informative mouth movements all reduce N400. Further, effects of meaningful gestures but not mouth informativeness are enhanced by prosodic accentuation, whereas effects of mouth are enhanced by meaningful gestures but reduced by beat gestures. Compared with L1, L2 participants benefit less from cues and their interactions, except for meaningful gestures and mouth movements. Thus, in real-world language comprehension, L2 comprehenders use multimodal cues just as L1 speakers albeit to a lesser extent.

Electrophysiological signatures of multimodal comprehension in second language

Using the visual-word paradigm, the present study investigated the effects of word onset and offset masking on the time course of non-native spoken-word recognition in the presence of background noise. In two experiments, Dutch non-native listeners heard English target words, preceded by carrier sentences that were noise-free (Experiment 1) or contained intermittent noise (Experiment 2). Target words were either onset- or offset-masked or not masked at all. Analyses showed that onset masking delayed target word recognition more than offset masking did. These results suggest that – in line with contemporary models of spoken-word recognition – non-native listeners strongly rely on word onset information when hearing words in noise.

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The expression of emotions and their cultural ties to Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni patients' views of the world in cross-cultural therapy

Differences in implicit vs. explicit grammar processing as revealed by drift-diffusion modeling of reaction times

Displacement and Evolution: A Neurocognitive and Comparative Perspective

The ‘know-what’ and the ‘know-how’: importance of declarative and procedural memory systems in the L2 learning of morphology, syntax and semantics

Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism

Subitizing Abilities of Bilingual Subset-Knowers

Long-range sequential dependencies precede complex syntactic production in language acquisition

Internet-based Assessment of an Inhibitory Control Advantage in Bilingual Chinese High School Students

Broken Telephone: Children's Judgments of Messages Delivered by Non-Native Speakers are Influenced by Processing Fluency

Language representations in L2 learners: Toward neural models

Electrophysiological signatures of multimodal comprehension in second language

The Effects of Onset and Offset Masking on the Time Course of Non-Native Spoken-Word Recognition in Noise

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