Being a nonnative speaker of a language poses challenges. Individuals often feel embarrassed by the errors they make when talking in their second language. However, here we report an advantage of being a nonnative speaker: Native speakers give foreign-accented speakers the benefit of the doubt when interpreting their utterances; as a result, apparently implausible utterances are more likely to be interpreted in a plausible way when delivered in a foreign than in a native accent. Across three replicated experiments, we demonstrated that native English speakers are more likely to interpret implausible utterances, such as "the mother gave the candle the daughter," as similar plausible utterances ("the mother gave the candle to the daughter") when the speaker has a foreign accent. This result follows from the general model of language interpretation in a noisy channel, under the hypothesis that listeners assume a higher error rate in foreign-accented than in nonaccented speech.

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Here we examined the role of bilingualism on cognitive inhibition using the Stroop

The present study was designed to examine the impact of bilingualism on the neuronal activity in different executive control processes namely conflict monitoring, control implementation (i.e., interference suppression and conflict resolution) and overcoming of inhibition. Twenty-two highly proficient but non-balanced successive French–German bilingual adults and 22 monolingual adults performed a combined Stroop/Negative priming task while event-related potential (ERP) were recorded online. The data revealed that the ERP effects were reduced in bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals but only in the Stroop task and limited to the N400 and the sustained fronto-central negative-going potential time windows. This result suggests that bilingualism may impact the process of control implementation rather than the process of conflict monitoring (N200). Critically, our study revealed a differential time course of the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conflict processing. While the ACC showed major activation in the early time windows (N200 and N400) but not in the latest time window (late sustained negative-going potential), the PFC became unilaterally active in the left hemisphere in the N400 and the late sustained negative-going potential time windows. Taken together, the present electroencephalography data lend support to a cascading neurophysiological model of executive control processes, in which ACC and PFC may play a determining role.

International audienceStudies on young children's online comprehension of pronominal reference suggests that children follow similar syntactic, semantic and discourse constraints as adults. However, the observed effects are less stable and appear much later in the eye movement record than in adults. It is not clear, whether this is because children are cued by a different set of factors than adults; or whether children use the same set of constraints, like subjecthood or first-mention, but the delay is caused by the developmental stage in which these cues are not yet fully acquired. We added an information structure cue (focus) and asked whether it affects syntactically more/less salient discourse referents (subjects/objects) the same way and shows a similar pattern in adults and children or whether it modulates the reliance on syntactic salience in children. Four-year-old German children and adults listened to stories with focused or unfocused syntactically prominent and non-prominent entities, subjects and objects, while we registered their eye movements to visually presented antecedents for ambiguous pronouns. Syntactic and information structural prominence interacted for children: focusing increased the looks to the syntactically salient subject antecedents, but not to the syntactically less salient object antecedents. This suggests that clefting helps children to locate the preferred antecedent. Adults' pronoun resolution in contrast was not modulated by clefting in a clear way. Instead, they showed an overall effect of syntactic prominence. Our study suggests that children and adults are sensitive to the same structural cues in reference resolution and that the time delay results from these constraints being not yet fully acquired. The process may be enhanced, but not modified, with additional cues such as clefts

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