Bilingualism as a lens to the mind and the brain
Judith Kroll
In the last two decades there has been an upsurge of research on the bilingual mind and brain. Although the world is multilingual, only recently have cognitive and language scientists come to see that the use of two or more languages provides a unique lens to examine neural plasticity across the lifespan. It is now accepted that the bilingual’s two languages are continually active, creating a dynamic interplay between them. But there continues to be controversy about the consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for the neural mechanisms that support attention and executive function. In the earliest months of life, minds and brains are tuned differently when exposed to more than one language from birth. That tuning has been hypothesized to open the speech system to new learning. For young adults, there is evidence that bilingualism creates greater efficiency in resolving conflict. For the oldest bilingual adults, there is evidence that a life of being bilingual confers protections against cognitive decline. In this talk, I describe research that begins to identify those aspects of bilingual language experience that may produce the observed consequences. An important observation in recent studies is that the minds and brains of bilinguals are inherently complex, social, and emotional, taking into account the variation in contexts in which the two languages are learned and used, and shaping the dynamics of cross-language exchange across the lifespan.
In the last two decades there has been an upsurge of research on the bilingual mind and brain. Although the world is multilingual, only recently have cognitive and language scientists come to see that the use of two or more languages provides a unique lens to examine neural plasticity across the lifespan. It is now accepted that the bilingual’s two languages are continually active, creating a dynamic interplay between them. But there continues to be controversy about the consequences of bilingualism for cognition and for the neural mechanisms that support attention and executive function. In the earliest months of life, minds and brains are tuned differently when exposed to more than one language from birth. That tuning has been hypothesized to open the speech system to new learning. For young adults, there is evidence that bilingualism creates greater efficiency in resolving conflict. For the oldest bilingual adults, there is evidence that a life of being bilingual confers protections against cognitive decline. In this talk, I describe research that begins to identify those aspects of bilingual language experience that may produce the observed consequences. An important observation in recent studies is that the minds and brains of bilinguals are inherently complex, social, and emotional, taking into account the variation in contexts in which the two languages are learned and used, and shaping the dynamics of cross-language exchange across the lifespan.
Emotions are ubiquitous in educational settings. Students frequently experience achievement emotions such as enjoyment, hope, pride, anger, anxiety, shame, or boredom at school and university. These emotions can profoundly influence their learning, performance, identity, and health. Nevertheless, traditionally achievement emotions have not received much attention by educational scientists. Test anxiety studies were a notable exception. More recently, however, there has been an affective turn. Today achievement emotions are a hot topic in inquiry on education, including research on language learning. In this talk, I will provide a state-of-the-art overview of this emerging field of research. Using Pekrun’s (2006, 2021) control-value theory as a conceptual framework, I will focus on the following issues. (1) Which emotions are experienced in academic settings, and how can they be measured? (2) Are achievement emotions functionally important for learning, achievement, and health? Test anxiety research has shown that anxiety can exert profound effects on performance; is this true for other achievement emotions as well? (3) How can we explain the development of these emotions, what are their individual and social origins? (4) Are achievement emotions universal, or do they differ between domains, genders, and cultures? (5) How can achievement emotions be regulated, and how can we design educational practices at school and university in emotionally sound ways? In closing, I will address open research problems, including the development of more sophisticated measures; strategies to integrate idiographic and nomothetic methodologies; and the need for educational intervention studies targeting achievement emotions and related change in educational policies and practices.
Achievement Emotions: State of the Art, Challenges, and Future Directions
Reinhard Pekrun
Emotional content and psychological context in language perception and memory: Lessons from neuroscience studies
Johanna Kissler
Much of human learning, including language learning, occurs via explicit instruction in formal social settings. This is a complex, multifactorial process, making generalization from experimental laboratory studies using neuroscience measures to classroom settings difficult. Still, some general principles identified in the experimental laboratory are likely to hold up in the real world. In this talk, I will present some such evidence, demonstrating how emotional content guides attention and memory in word processing. Furthermore, I will show how this is modulated by the psychological context in which words are encountered. Perceived psychological context is often sufficient to not only accelerate and increase brain activity in language processing, changes in context can also result in a substantial change in the brain structures that are recruited. Remarkably, even without a learning instruction, contextually induced psychological relevance can improve long-term memory for words more than an explicit learning instruction does. However, in a typical paired-associate learning set-up, which essentially resembles textbook-based vocabulary learning, emotional content is not acquired faster than neutral content. Together, these studies indicate substantial benefits of emotion in language learning, which should be considered in formal contexts, while also pointing to some limitations.
Classical models assume that conceptual knowledge is represented in an amodal format distinct from the sensory-motor and introspective systems. More recent grounded cognition models, however, propose that concepts are embodied in the sense that interactions with the environment form their conceptual memory traces in distributed sensory, action-related or introspective modality-specific brain systems. In neurophysiological experiments, we demonstrate that access to concepts involves a partial reinstatement of brain activity during the perception of objects, the execution of motor actions and the introspection of emotions, mental states and social constellations. We observed an involvement of such experiential brain systems not only in object concepts (e.g., table), but also in abstract everyday concepts (e.g. justice) and in abstract scientific psychological concepts (e.g. conditioning). For abstract concepts, modality-specific brain systems related to the introspection of emotions, mental states and social constellations played a particular role. Both training studies with novel concepts and studies with real concrete and abstract concepts in experts vs. novices revealed experience-dependent brain activity. A conceptual task activated a given modality-specific experiential brain area only when participants had rich interaction experiences with the referent. These findings support the view that both concrete and abstract concepts are grounded in experiential brain systems related to perception, action and introspection as a function of the interaction experience during concept acquisition.
Grounding of concrete and abstract concepts in brain systems related to perception, action and introspection
Markus Kiefer
Holistic approaches to the study of emotions and identity in language learning and use
Adrienn Fekete
In the field of English applied linguistics, learners and their learning processes including their psychological and emotional responses to second language acquisition (SLA) were traditionally researched in isolation following the psychometric tradition. By contrast, learners’ idiosyncratic, and often life-changing experiences, that shape their identities are usually examined holistically drawing on interview and case studies. In my talk, I will bring under the same roof these two seemingly incompatible research traditions to shed light on language learners’ multilingual (and multicultural) identity construction. The talk will draw on the basic tenets that language and culture are inherently intertwined in SLA and that language learning is embodied triggering powerful emotional responses to language learning and use. Then, I will discuss three holistic approaches to examining learners and their various responses to SLA including language ecology, complex dynamic systems theory (CDST), and post-structuralism. These approaches have three important principles in common. (1) They look at learners holistically in their complexity and entirety. (2) They perceive learner-intrinsic and contextual factors as interconnected, dynamic, and changing over time. (3) They examine learners and their learning processes in response to environmental stimuli in the form of other individuals (e.g., other learners and teachers), learning materials, different languages, the learning environment, the educational context, and the socio-cultural environment. I will also present my latest research results drawing on these theories. I will explain how I conceptualize language learners’ identity construction as a complex dynamic system of individual differences and how fundamental features of complex dynamic systems can be detected in learners’ psychological responses to language use. Finally, I will present examples of powerful emotional responses to language learning and use, the transformative potential of SLA, and the language learner’s imagined L2 habitus pinpointing how learners speak, think, and behave differently when they switch to the different languages they speak.
Research Overview
Judith F. Kroll is Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine and former director of the Center for Language Science at Pennsylvania State University. She held faculty positions at Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, Mount Holyoke College, Penn State University, and University of California, Riverside before joining the faculty at UC Irvine in 2019. Her research uses the tools of cognitive neuroscience to examine the way that bilinguals juggle the presence of two languages in one mind and brain. Her work, which has been supported by grants from NSF and NIH, shows that bilingualism provides a tool for revealing the interplay between language and cognition that is otherwise obscure in speakers of one language alone. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the APA, the APS, the Psychonomic Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She was one of the founding editors of the journal Bilingualism Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press), and one of the founding organizers of Women in Cognitive Science, a group
developed to promote the advancement of women in the cognitive sciences and supported by NSF (http://womenincogsci.org/). With Penn State colleagues, she was the PI on a 2010 NSF PIRE (Partnerships for International Research and Education) grant to develop an international research network and program of training to enable language scientists at all levels to pursue research abroad on the science
of bilingualism and on a 2015 NSF PIRE grant to translate the science of bilingualism to learning environments in the US and abroad.
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Research Overview
Reinhard Pekrun is Professor of Psychology at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney. His research areas include achievement emotion and motivation, personality development, and educational assessment and evaluation. Pekrun pioneered research on emotions in education and originated the Control-Value Theory of Achievement Emotions. He has published more than 350 books, articles, and chapters, and is listed among the top ten currently most highly cited educational researchers in the world. Pekrun is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the International Academy of Education, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He served as President of the Stress and Anxiety Research Society and Vice-President for Research and Teacher Education at the University of Munich, and he is active in policy development and implementation in education. Pekrun received the 2015 John G. Diefenbaker Award from the Canada Council which acknowledges outstanding research accomplishments across fields in the humanities and social sciences. He is also the recipient of the Sylvia Scribner Award 2017 (AERA, Division C), the EARLI Oeuvre Award 2017 (European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction), and the Lifetime Achievement Award 2018 of the German Psychological Society.
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Johanna Kissler is a Professor of Psychology at Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. She studied Psychology and Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Regensburg, Germany and obtained her PhD in Psychology from the University of Konstanz, Germany. After a post-doctoral year in the Linguistics Department at the University of Konstanz, Germany, she became junior professor of clinical psychology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Konstanz in 2003. In 2011 she was appointed professor of general psychology at Bielefeld University. She held guest professorships at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, the University of Georgia, Athens, USA and UC Los Angeles, USA. Her research addresses the role emotions play for attention, language, and memory processing in healthy people as well as individuals with psychological disorders and neurological illness using experimental psychology and neuroscience methods. Current interests regard the extent to which emotional processing is automatic or can be controlled, the conditions under which people benefit from or are disturbed by emotional information, and the role social contexts play for emotional processing.
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Markus Kiefer is Professor, psychologist and neuroscientist. He directs the Section for Cognitive Electrophysiology at the Clinic of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy III of Ulm University and teaches Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Psychology and Education of this university. Markus Kiefer’s research interests cover the fields of memory, language and consciousness. He published numerous articles about his research in these fields. One major topic of his work is the area of Embodied Cognition, the grounding of thought and language in perception and action.
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Adrienn Fekete is an English applied linguist and assistant professor at the University of Pécs in Hungary. Her research interests include psychological, emotional and identity responses to language learning, linguacultural identities, the psychology and methodology of online and offline education drawing on complex dynamic systems theory, and intercultural communication. Her courses focus on teaching methodology, intercultural communication, individual differences in second language acquisition, research methodology, educational drama, and translation studies.
She is the director of the Australian Studies Centre and the organizer of a major intercultural event and cultural exhibition called Intercultural Encounters held annually at the University of Pécs. She publishes her papers in international journals and books and regularly gives talks at international conferences. She has been a guest professor at various Spanish universities. For many years, she has been implementing telecollaboration with researchers, professors and students from Japan, Indonesia, Australia, and Spain in the Virtual Guest Project. She joined the ERL Network in 2020 and has given several talks in the ERL Online Sessions. Since 2022 she has been a member of ERLA and the ERL Think Tank.
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