First- and second-language phonological representations in the mental lexicon

Performance-based studies on the psychological nature of linguistic competence can conceal significant differences in the brain processes that underlie native versus nonnative knowledge of language. Here we report results from the brain activity of very proficient early bilinguals making a lexical decision task that illustrates this point. Two groups of SpanishCatalan early bilinguals (Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant) were asked to decide whether a given form was a Catalan word or not. The nonwords were based on real words, with one vowel changed. In the experimental stimuli, the vowel change involved a Catalan-specific contrast that previous research had shown to be difficult for Spanish natives to perceive. In the control stimuli, the vowel switch involved contrasts common to Spanish and Catalan. The results indicated that the groups of bilinguals did not differ in their behavioral and event-related brain potential measurements for the control stimuli; both groups made very few errors and showed a larger N400 component for control nonwords than for control words. However, significant differences were observed for the experimental stimuli across groups: Specifically, Spanish-dominant bilinguals showed great difficulty in rejecting experimental nonwords. Indeed, these participants not only showed very high error rates for these stimuli, but also did not show an error-related negativity effect in their erroneous nonword decisions. However, both groups of bilinguals showed a larger correctrelated negativity when making correct decisions about the experimental nonwords. The results suggest that although some aspects of a second language system may show a remarkable lack of plasticity (like the acquisition of some foreign contrasts), first-language representations seem to be more dynamic in their capacity of adapting and incorporating new information. &

A Case-based reasoning approach to validate grammatical gender and number agreement in Spanish language

Across Latin America 420 indigenous languages are spoken. Spanish is considered a second language in indigenous communities and is progressively introduced in education. However, most of the tools to support teaching processes of a second language have been developed for the most common languages such as English, French, German, Italian, etc. As a result, only a small amount of learning objects and authoring tools have been developed for indigenous people considering the specific needs of their population. This paper introduces Multilingual–Tiny as a web authoring tool to support the virtual experience of indigenous students and teachers when they are creating learning objects in indigenous languages or in Spanish language, in particular, when they have to deal with the grammatical structures of Spanish. Multilingual–Tiny has a module based on the Case-based Reasoning technique to provide recommendations in real time when teachers and students write texts in Spanish. An experiment was performed in order to compare some local similarity functions to retrieve cases from the case library taking into account the grammatical structures. As a result we found the similarity function with the best performance

El plan de lengua y cohesión social en Catañunya: primeros datos de una investigación = Language and Social Cohesion Plan in Catalonia: Initial research data

Los programas de inmersión lingüística han constituido y constituyen dentro del Sistema Educativo catalánla principal forma para que el alumnado de lengua familiar no-catalana aprenda una nueva lengua, el catalán,sin que, en su proceso de aprendizaje, vea mermado ni el desarrollo de su propia lengua ni su rendimientoacadémico. El éxito de la inmersión lingüística en las décadas anteriores ha sido frecuentemente utilizado comouno de los argumentos orientativos para justificar la política lingüística que se sigue en la escolarización de lainfancia extranjera. Sin embargo, los resultados obtenidos por investigaciones recientes parece que no avalanempíricamente dicho argumento. Este artículo analiza dichos resultados y expone, a partir del Plan para laLengua y Cohesión Social puesto en marcha por el Departamento de Educación de la Generalitat de Cataluña,cuáles son los retos que se presentan a su Sistema Educativo dentro del nuevo marco que supone el aumento de ladiversidad cultural y lingüística en la actual sociedad catalana