Jul 2026· Brain and Language· Vol 280, pp.
105800
· 0 citations· 89 references
Medicine
Abstract
Since the 1990s, the fields of numerical cognition and psycholinguistics have evolved largely independently. However, the research since then demonstrates that language and numbers are intrinsically related, particularly in multilingual contexts. Language characteristics (e.g., morpho-syntactic properties) and language status (e.g., monolingual vs. multilingual) influence numerical processing at multiple levels, from number identification and retrieval to advanced mathematical skills. This article builds on the contribution of Frenck-Mestre and Vaid (1992), "Language as a Factor in the Identification of Ordinary Words and Number Words", to further elaborate how language contributes to the learning of numerical concepts, especially the acquisition and representation of number words across development. While their findings provided initial important insights into bilingual number processing, subsequent research, which we discuss in the current article, further shows that language and multilingual experiences can shape lexical, semantic, and lexico-semantic access to numbers. We finish by outlining some future research directions for the study of multilingual number representations.
In this paper, I propose a formal model of the representation and processing of an integrated multilingual phonological grammar. Two options are considered: (a) a merged union of features from all languages, and (b) an integrated repository which includes representational language tags on hierarchical phonological structures. I argue that the tagged model is preferred given that the merged-union proposal runs into problems with (a) ranking paradoxes, and (b) requiring extra theoretical machinery to block subsets of hierarchies. The tagged model introduces no new theoretical machinery, and has the added value that it is consistent with psycholinguistic approaches which rely on either suppression or activation. I develop a model which (a) incorporates the syntax/phonology interface and (b) articulates details of the various stages of Phonetic Form (PF) spellout. Such an approach recognizes the important role phonology plays in current models of the grammatical architecture, particularly as applied to multilingual knowledge and performance.
Previous evidence has shown an important role for semantic diversity in visual word recognition. These results are theoretically relevant, as they suggest that it is not only the mere repetition of word reading (lexical frequency) but also the semantic context in which words are encountered that affects lexical representation of words. In this study, we assess the role of semantic diversity by applying latent semantic analysis to a Spanish database, deriving word values for semantic diversity. Children and adults performed a lexical decision task to 300 words with different values of this variable while controlling the frequency, age of acquisition, and letter length. The results indicate that adults and children respond faster to words with high semantic diversity than those with lower semantic diversity. These results obtained for the first time in Spanish are consistent with previous findings and support the view that the semantic contexts in which words appear contribute to their lexical representations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Miguel Lázaro, Seila García, Guillermo Jorge-Botana et al.· Canadian journal of experime...· 0 citations
Language background can show subtle effects on number comparison even with Arabic digits. Number pairs can be decade-unit compatible, i.e. the decision about number size is the same for unit and decade (e.g. 24 and 57, 2 < 5 and 4 < 7), or decade-unit incompatible (e.g. 29 and 57, 2 < 5 but 9 > 7). Incompatible pairs often lead to longer response times. This compatibility effect is larger in languages with number word inversion (e.g. German). We aimed to investigate the influence of language on the compatibility effect in bilinguals. In Experiment 1, we compared the compatibility effect in German monolinguals and German-English bilinguals. We found a significant compatibility effect, but no significant differences between the mono- and bilinguals. In Experiment 2, we manipulated language activation within participants by asking German-English bilinguals to describe scenes either in English or German before completing number comparison trials. There was a significant cost of switching languages, showing that participants did activate German and English. However, the size of the compatibility effect was not significantly influenced by participants activating German or English. Overall, we did not find an influence of a bilingual’s language on number comparison with Arabic digits.
Silke M. Göbel, Veniamin Shiron, M. Tucker et al.· Scientific Reports· 0 citations
Several factors influence how adult speakers produce an utterance and which element they choose to start with. For example, German-speaking adults are more likely to begin an utterance with an element if it is (a) in their focus of attention, (b) animate rather than inanimate, and (c) on the left side of a picture rather than the right. However, while such prominence-lending factors affect adult language production, little is known about their effect on child language production. The current study addresses this issue by testing German preschoolers in picture-based language production tasks while measuring gaze patterns via eye-tracking. Specifically, we examined the effect of three factors known to affect adult language production—attentional cueing, animacy, and position in a visual display. To assess how children respond to these manipulations, we zoomed in on two syntactic structures for which children demonstrate varying degrees of proficiency: conjoined noun phrases and transitive sentences. Our results revealed no effects of animacy and position, but significant effects of attention on child language production. Children were more likely to first fixate on a character that had been visually cued and were also more likely to name that character first when producing conjoined noun phrases. Furthermore, initial fixations predicted the order in which children mentioned elements, suggesting a tight link between visual attention and language production. However, visual attention exclusively affected the linearization of nouns in simple conjoined noun phrases but not the selection of starting points in children's production of transitive sentences. These findings show that children's tendency to verbalize what is in their focus of attention is influenced by syntactic complexity. Specifically, even when children's focus of attention was on the patient character, they nonetheless adhered to their preferred active SVO sentence structure. Furthermore, children's sentence planning strategies as reflected by speech-onset-times and the number of disfluencies were likewise immune to prominence-lending factors. Thus, unlike adults in comparable experiments, our findings seem to suggest that children did not show a radically linear incremental word-by-word sentence planning strategy that proceeds from the element in the focus of attention.
Sarah Dolscheid, M. Penke· Frontiers in Language Scienc...· 0 citations
Adult and young bilinguals co-activate their languages to different degrees, even in entirely monolingual tasks. However, many studies use translation pairs with high phonological overlap (e.g., the English-GERMAN: "milk"-"MILCH"), making it difficult to discern the origin of the co-activation. This study examined language co-activation in Catalan-Spanish bilingual toddlers using words with minimal phonological overlap across translations. Thirty Catalan-Spanish bilingual three-year-olds (N = 30; Mage = 36.38 months, range = 35.57-37.43) participated in a visual word paradigm conducted entirely in Catalan, searching for an absent target named in Catalan (e.g., "apple" in Catalan: "poma," Spanish: "MANZANA") among images with labels that shared the initial phoneme across languages or were unrelated. The design included three types of images: (a) direct phonologically related (e.g., Spanish "PATO" for "duck"), (b) indirect phonologically related (e.g., Catalan "mitjó" for "sock"), and (c) unrelated (e.g., "brush," "sandwich"). If bilingual toddlers co-activate languages, they should look more at phonologically related than unrelated images due to shared phonological onsets. The results supported the hypotheses and provided solid evidence that young bilinguals co-activate phonologically related words in their familiar languages. Moreover, contrasting direct and indirect (translation-mediated) competitors showed that language co-activation unfolds dynamically, with timing shaped by the number of links involved.
Daniela S. Avila-Varela, Nuria Sebastian-Galles· Developmental Science· 0 citations
This study investigates how the concept of morphological transcendence (
Libben, 2010
,
2014
) is manifest across semantic, visual, and phonetic
processing of English compounds. The theory of morphological transcendence proposes that constituents inside compounds take on
position-specific meanings that differ from their meanings as independent words. We first assess this claim using the CAOSS model
(
Marelli et al., 2017
), which represents a compound as the sum of two transformed
constituent semantic vectors that can be interpreted as transcended meanings. CAOSS provides a useful computational formalisation
of this idea and captures aspects of semantic transparency within its training data. However, it generalises poorly to unseen
compounds, highlighting the context sensitivity of compound interpretation and the limits of a single global mapping from
constituent meanings to compound meanings. We next examine subliminal reading using a Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM;
Heitmeier et al., 2026
). Because reading is incremental, early comprehension depends on
the location of ocular fixation. We show that access to low frequency boundary trigrams allows the DLM to shift rapidly toward the
compound meaning, an effect we term ocular transcendence. Predictors from the DLM model account well for lexical decision
latencies, whereas predictors from the CAOSS model do not, suggesting that the two models capture different aspects of
comprehension. Finally, we analyse the pitch contours of three-constituent compounds. We demonstrate that these contours transcend
those of the constituents alone, providing evidence for an effect we term phonetic transcendence. Together, these findings support
a view of the lexicon as a dynamic, context-sensitive system, aligning with
Libben’s
(2022)
broader theoretical framework in which the mental lexicon is best understood as a flexicon.
M. Bell, R. Harald Baayen· The Mental Lexicon· 0 citations