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Effects of proficiency and immersion experience on neural encoding of acoustic and linguistic information by Mandarin Chinese learners of English
Poster Session D, Thursday, October 1, 4:30 - 6:30 pm, Wangari Maathai
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Mika Nash1, Adam T. Tierney1, Giovanni Di Liberto2,3, Magdalena Kachlicka1,4,5; 1School of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom, 2Trinity College Institute for Neuroscience, Ireland, 3School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, 4Institute of Computer Science, University of Bern, Switzerland, 5Center for Experimental Neurology and Sleep Wake Epilepsy Center-NeuroTec, Department of Neurology, InselSpital, Bern University Hospital, University of Bern
Learning a second language (L2) in adulthood is difficult, and not all learners achieve the desired level of proficiency. Acquiring an L2 is difficult because it requires individuals to learn to detect acoustic and linguistic structures that differ from those of their native language. Can immersion experience help learners to better encode acoustic cues and linguistic structures? Does the robustness of acoustic and linguistic encoding drive language proficiency? In this ongoing study, we ask whether extensive experience and immersion in an L2 environment can change neural encoding of acoustic and linguistic features of the second language. We aim to recruit 80 native Mandarin Chinese speakers with various levels of English proficiency and immersion experience and, as a comparison group, 20 native English speakers who do not speak any foreign language. So far, we have collected data from 30 participants, including L2 learners with 6 months to 15 years of immersion experience. L2 learners complete an online battery of tests measuring different aspects of English language proficiency (i.e. prosody and vowel perception, vocabulary and grammar knowledge). Additionally, all participants complete assessments of listening and cognitive skills, including tests measuring speech perception strategies (use of pitch versus duration to perceive lexical stress) and the ability to selectively attend to one acoustic dimension (pitch) while ignoring another (duration). To measure participants' brain activity, we use electroencephalography (EEG). During the EEG recording, participants listen to podcast excerpts featuring conversations between native speakers of English, which include naturally occurring disfluencies, turn-taking and speaker variability. We also collect comprehension, engagement, and effort measures. Neural responses will be analysed using the mTRF toolbox (Crosse et al., 2016) to quantify cortical tracking of various acoustic (e.g. envelope, pitch) or linguistic (e.g. phoneme/word onsets, prosody, grammar, semantic similarity, lexical surprisal) features. To measure how well each feature is represented in the brain, we will compute the Pearson's r correlation coefficient between the actual brain response and predicted EEG responses and use this prediction accuracy as an index of neural encoding strength. We will then compare the encoding of those features across participants with various L2 profiles and lengths of residence. We hypothesise that greater immersion experience and higher L2 proficiency will shift cortical tracking from acoustic-dominant to linguistic-dominant patterns, with advanced learners showing more native-like encoding of grammatical and semantic structures. We further hypothesise that auditory and cognitive abilities will explain additional variance in neural encoding beyond proficiency alone. By integrating behavioural, cognitive and neural measures, this work will provide insights into how learners adapt to the acoustic and linguistic structure of a non-native language during real-world speech processing. It will also reveal how the encoding of different types of information changes as a function of language proficiency and immersion experience. These results will help us understand the benefits and limitations of intensive exposure to foreign languages later in life, an increasingly common but poorly understood life experience.
Topic Areas: Speech Perception,