Hi I need the answers these questions based on the article bilingual language learning .only use this article to find the answers to these questions please thank you . The idea that lexical similarity...

Hi I need the answers these questions based on the article bilingual language learning .only use this article to find the answers to these questions please thank you .

1. The idea that lexical similarity may play an important role in why bilingual and monolingual children have differences in their phonetic development is mentioned on page 2. What is lexical similarity and how may it influence phonetic development in bilingual infants?
   


2. Relating the theory of lexical similarity to the bilingual children you currently teach, your own children, or children you’re familiar with; how does lexical similarity influence later word production and word/letter recognition in both languages?
   


3. On page 11, the authors state “bilingual infants may remain ‘‘open’’ longer to language experience than monolingual infants”. How does this statement and the findings of this study relate to the critical period of language learning? How does it affect, or not affect, the critical period?
   

Bilingual language learning An ERP study relating early brain responses to speech, language input, and later word production Journal of Phonetics ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]] Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Phonetics 0095-44 doi:10.1 n Corr E-m Pleas langu journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics Bilingual language learning: An ERP study relating early brain responses to speech, language input, and later word production Adrian Garcia-Sierra a, Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola a, Cherie R. Percaccio a, Barbara T. Conboy b, Harriett Romo c, Lindsay Klarman a, Sophia Ortiz c, Patricia K. Kuhl a,n a Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, University of Washington, Box 357988, Seattle, WA 98195, USA b University of Redlands, USA c University of Texas at San Antonio, USA a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 5 February 2010 Received in revised form 30 June 2011 Accepted 5 July 2011 70/$ - see front matter & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. A 016/j.wocn.2011.07.002 esponding author. Tel.: þ1 206 685 1921. ail address: [email protected] (P.K. K e cite this article as: Garcia-Sierra, A age input, and later word productio a b s t r a c t Research on the development of speech processing in bilingual children has typically implemented a cross-sectional design and relied on behavioral measures. The present study is the first to explore brain measures within a longitudinal study of this population. We report results from the first phase of data analysis in a longitudinal study exploring Spanish-English bilingual children and the relationships among (a) early brain measures of phonetic discrimination in both languages, (b) degree of exposure to each language in the home, and (c) children’s later bilingual word production abilities. Speech discrimination was assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs). A bilingual questionnaire was used to quantify the amount of language exposure from all adult speakers in the household, and subsequent word production was evaluated in both languages. Our results suggest that bilingual infants’ brain responses to speech differ from the pattern shown by monolingual infants. Bilingual infants did not show neural discrimination of either the Spanish or English contrast at 6–9 months. By 10–12 months of age, neural discrimination was observed for both contrasts. Bilingual infants showed continuous improvement in neural discrimination of the phonetic units from both languages with increasing age. Group differences in bilingual infants’ speech discrimination abilities are related to the amount of exposure to each of their native languages in the home. Finally, we show that infants’ later word production measures are significantly related to both their early neural discrimination skills and the amount exposure to the two languages early in development. & 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Studies of speech perception in monolingual infants have shown that the ability to differentiate native speech sounds improves with language exposure (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2001; Kuhl et al., 2006; Sundara, Polka, & Genesee, 2006; Tsao, Liu, & Kuhl, 2006), suggesting that language learning results in neural commitment to the sounds of an infant’s native language early in development (Kuhl, 2004). Infants exhibit a perceptual narrowing during the first year of life, showing increasing sensitivity to native speech sounds and decreasing sensitivity to non-native speech sounds (Best & McRoberts, 2003; Kuhl et al., 2006; Velleman & Vihman, 2002; Werker & Tees, 1984; for reviews see Kuhl et al., 2008; Werker & Curtin, 2005). This pattern of perceptual change in monolingual infants leads to questions regarding the development of speech perception in ll rights reserved. uhl). ., et al. Bilingual language n. Journal of Phonetics (201 infants exposed to more than one language from birth (i.e., simultaneous bilinguals). Only a few studies have addressed this question and results have been mixed, perhaps due to differences in methodology, differences in the amount of lan- guage exposure to the two languages in individual bilingual participants, and the specific characteristics of the languages and speech contrasts studied. In a behavioral cross-sectional study, Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2003a) compared 4-, 8- and 12-month-old infants from Spanish monolingual households, Catalan monolingual households, and Spanish-Catalan bilingual households on a vowel contrast that is phonemic in Catalan but not in Spanish (/e/ vs. /e/). Their results showed that all groups, monolingual and bilingual, discriminated the vowel contrast at 4 months of age. However, at 8 months of age, only Catalan monolingual infants successfully discriminated the vowel con- trast. Interestingly, bilinguals at 12 months of age also demon- strated the ability to discriminate the speech contrast. The authors reported the same developmental pattern in bilingual infants in a study of consonants (Bosch & Sebastián-Gallés, 2003b) and interpreted the results as evidence that different processes learning: An ERP study relating early brain responses to speech, 1), doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2011.07.002 www.elsevier.com/locate/phonetics dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2011.07.002 mailto:[email protected] dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2011.07.002 dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2011.07.002 A. Garcia-Sierra et al. / Journal of Phonetics ] (]]]]) ]]]–]]]2 may underlie bilingual vs. monolingual phoneme category for- mation (at least for speech sounds with different distributional properties in each of the two languages). In more recent work, Sebastián-Gallés and Bosch (2009) tested bilingual and monolingual Spanish/Catalan infants in their ability to behaviorally discriminate two vowels (/o/ vs. /u/), which are common to and contrastive in both languages. The results showed the same U-shaped pattern reported by Bosch and Sebastián- Gallés (2003a). That is, 4-month-old bilinguals and 12-month-old bilinguals were able to discriminate the acoustically similar sounds but 8-month-old bilinguals failed to do so. In other words, even though the vowels /o/ and /u/ are phonemic in both languages, 8-month-old bilinguals appeared to perceptually merge the two sounds into a single phonetic category. Sebas- tián-Gallés and Bosch also tested bilingual and monolingual Spanish/Catalan infants in their ability to behaviorally discrimi- nate a second pair of vowels that are common to and contrastive in both languages, but acoustically more salient (i.e., /e/ vs. /u/). Eight-month-old bilinguals were able to discriminate this acous- tically distant contrast. The authors interpreted these data as supporting the idea that differences may exist in monolingual and bilingual phonetic development and that factors in addition to the distributional frequency of phonetic units in language input, such as lexical similarity, may play an important role. In contrast, other investigations have found that bilingual infants discriminate phonetic contrasts in their native languages in the same way as monolingual infants. For example, Burns, Yoshida, Hill, and Werker (2007) tested voice-onset time con- sonant discrimination using English-relevant as well as French- relevant values at 6–8, 10–12, and 14–20 months in English monolingual and English-French bilingual infants. As expected, 6–8-month-old English monolingual infants behaviorally discri- minated both contrasts while 10–12- and 14–20-month-old English monolingual infants discriminated only the English con- trast. In bilingual infants, all age groups were able to discriminate both contrasts. The authors interpreted the data as evidence that bilingual infants’ phonetic representational systems develop at the same pace as monolingual infants. Similarly, Sundara, Polka, and Molnar (2008) found that 10–12-month-old French-English bilingual infants were able to behaviorally discriminate a French /d/ from an English /d/, while age-matched French monolingual infants were unable to do so, a pattern the authors interpreted as indicating that monolingual and bilingual infants develop pho- netic representations at the same pace (for a similar result using vowel contrasts see Sundara & Scutellaro, this issue). The conflicting results reported in the bilingual literature described above might be explained by the fact that Spanish and Catalan share more cognates than French and English. Therefore, Spanish and Catalan have greater phonemic overlap, and thus more similar speech sounds, than French and English (see Bosch & Ramon-Casas, this issue). However, in a recent study using an anticipatory eye movement paradigm, Albareda-Castellot, Pons, and Sebastián-Gallés (2011) demonstrated that 8-month-old Catalan- Spanish bilinguals were as good as their Catalan monolingual peers in discriminating /e/ vs. /e/, a speech contrast previously reported as not discriminated by 8-month-old bilinguals by Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2003a). Albareda-Castellot and colleagues note that the Catalan language and the Spanish language share many cognates and hypothesize that the familiarization-preference meth- odology used by Bosch and Sebastián-Gallés (2003a) may have obscured bilinguals’ discrimination abilities. Although the findings of Albareda-Castellot et al. await replication, they suggest that bilingual infants’ development of phonetic perception abilities occurs in the same time frame as their monolingual peers. In the present study we broaden the investigation of the development of bilingual speech discrimination by: (1) using an Please cite this article as: Garcia-Sierra, A., et al. Bilingual language language input, and later word production. Journal of Phonetics (201 electrophysiological measure of phonetic discrimination which reduces the potential effects of cognitive factors, such as atten- tion; (2) quantifying language exposure concurrently in the home based on duration of infants’ exposure to English and to Spanish using in-home interviews and a bilingual questionnaire adminis- tered as part of the interview; and (3) employing a longitudinal design that combined cross-sectional assessments of phonetic discrimination at two early ages (6–9 and 10–12 months), assessment of language exposure at those two ages, and long- itudinal follow up assessment of subsequent word production in all infants in both languages, allowing investigation of concurrent and predictive relationships among these measures. This is the first ERP study of speech perception in bilingual infants that combines concurrent and longitudinal methods to assess early phonetic perception, early language exposure, and later word production (see Conboy & Mills, 2006; Vihman, Thierry, Lum, Keren-Portnoy, & Martin, 2007 for bilingual ERP data regarding words). We employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to assess dis- criminative responses to phonetic changes in the form of the mismatch negativity (MMN). The MMN is automatically elicited by infrequent stimuli (deviants) that are embedded in a repeating background stimulus (standards) (Näätänen, 1990, 1992). The MMN, a negative deflection observed about 250 ms after the deviant stimulus is presented, has been shown to reflect neural activity associated with phonetic discrimination in adults (Näätänen et al., 1997). Infant studies also show a discriminatory response to a change in speech syllables that often appears as a negative wave (Alho, Sainio, Sajaniemi, Reinikainen, & Näätänen, 1990; Čeponien_e et al., 2000; Cheour et al., 1998, 1999; Kuhl et al., 2008; Rivera-Gaxiola, Silva-Pereyra, & Kuhl, 2005; Rivera-Gaxiola, Klarman, Garcia-Sierra, & Kuhl, 2005; Rivera-Gaxiola et al., 2007). However, a number of studies in infants have reported a positive component in the difference wave in response to tones, native and non-native phonemes, and native and non-native stress patterns (Dehaene-Lambertz & Dehaene, 1994; Friederici, Friedrich, & Christophe, 2007; Friederici, Friedrich, & Weber, 2002; Friedrich, Herold, & Friederici, 2009; He, Hotson, & Trainor