Search Results (92)

Objective: Language delay (LD) is a common developmental condition in which children fail to achieve age-appropriate language milestones, affecting communication, cognition, and social integration. It affects approximately 1 in 14 preschool children and may have long-term consequences into adulthood. The period from 12 to 36 months is a critical window for language development, during which children begin to comprehend and produce their first words. Early identification of risk factors during this stage is essential for timely intervention. However, in Vietnam, data on factors associated with language delay in this age group remain limited. Therefore, this study aimed to identify factors associated with language delay in children aged 12–36 months. Methods: A case–control study was conducted, including 55 children with language delay and 55 typically developing children aged 12–36 months. Personal, familial, medical, and environmental data were collected using structured questionnaires. Univariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed to identify factors associated with language delay. Results: A total of 110 children (43 boys and 67 girls) were included. The strongest risk factor was the use of screens to calm or occupy children (OR = 36.6; p < 0.001). Early bilingual exposure was a significant protective factor (OR = 0.12; p = 0.014), while shared reading or picture viewing showed a strong but borderline protective effect (OR = 0.23; p = 0.051). Conclusions: The use of screens to calm or occupy children was the main risk factor for language delay, whereas early bilingual exposure and shared reading or picture viewing were protective factors. These findings highlight the importance of limiting non-interactive screen use and promoting interactive language activities to support early language development. Full article

The bilingual advantage hypothesis proposes that bilingual children will display greater executive function (EF) skills compared to their monolingual peers. However, most research on this topic neglects to include monolingual children from both language groups for comparison, thus confounding language status and cultural context. To address this gap, we administered an extensive battery of EF tasks to 189 typically developing children ages 47–95 months (M_age = 71.47, SD = 11.68, 42.9 % Female) drawn from three language status groups: Korean-English Bilingual and English Monolingual (both in the northwestern United States) and Korean Monolingual (South Korea). Korean-English Bilingual children scored significantly higher on the EF composite than Korean Monolingual children, even after controlling for child age and verbal ability. Both English Monolingual and Korean-English Bilingual children waited significantly longer during a delay-of-gratification task than Korean Monolingual children when controlling for age and verbal ability. Korean-English Bilingual children outperformed English Monolingual and Korean Monolingual children on the Comprehensive Test of Nonverbal Intelligence. There were no significant differences between language status groups on the other individual EF tasks after adjusting for multiple comparisons. Taken together, we did not find consistent support for a bilingual advantage in EF skills: Country of residence also played a role, with children living in the United States outperforming children living in Korea in some cases. Full article

Research on relative clause (RC) attachment ambiguity has shown that parsing preferences vary cross-linguistically, and that bilingual exposure can influence both the L2 and the L1. However, few studies have examined parsing preferences in both languages of the same bilingual populations, and the English–Italian pairing remains underexplored. This study addressed these gaps by investigating RC attachment resolution in 112 participants across four groups: British university students learning Italian in UK classrooms (n = 27; age of L2 acquisition: M = 17.6, SD = 1.3), British long-term residents in Italy (n = 27; age of L2 acquisition: M = 24.0, SD = 7.7; length of residence: M = 20.4, SD = 14.1), and English (n = 31) and Italian (n = 27) monolingual controls. Using self-paced reading tasks, we measured attachment preferences and reading times in both languages. In Italian ambiguous trials, controls showed a significant high-attachment preference while neither bilingual group showed a significant preference in the same direction. The model revealed a significant overall group difference driven by a contrast between Italian controls and students, though not specific to ambiguous trials. Both bilingual groups were also overall slower to parse RCs than Italian controls after controlling for proficiency or age differences. In English, all groups performed at chance level with no significant differences in preferences or reading times. These exploratory findings suggest that L1 influence on L2 RC attachment may persist even in proficient immersed bilinguals. No clear evidence of L1 attrition emerged, contrasting with previous Spanish–English findings and with anaphora resolution results in the same sample. Methodological limitations constrain interpretation and should be addressed in future research. Full article

This study presents a controlled empirical and comparative analysis of existing data augmentation techniques for text generation in Turkish, a morphologically rich, low-resource language. A collection of 265 Turkish reading passages for Grades 4 and 5 was augmented using four techniques: paraphrasing with GPT-3.5-turbo (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 Turbo), back translation (Turkish–English–Turkish and Turkish–French–Turkish) via Google Translate, synonym replacement via GPT-3.5-turbo, and random insertion via GPT-3.5-turbo. Human evaluators assessed the fluency, coherence, grammaticality, logical flow, and naturalness of the augmented datasets. Each augmented dataset, along with the original, was then used to fine-tune a Turkish GPT-2-medium model, which was evaluated using automatic metrics such as BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy), ROUGE (Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation), METEOR (Metric for Evaluation of Translation with Explicit ORdering), chrF (CHaRacter-level F-score), BERTScore (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers Score), and cosine similarity. According to the human evaluation of the original and augmented datasets, the original texts received the highest ratings, followed by those generated through random insertion, paraphrasing, synonym replacement, and back translation variants, with cosine similarity results between original and augmented texts showing a comparable trend; however, the differences between methods were generally small. The results from text generation indicate that models trained on the original dataset generally achieved slightly higher performance across evaluation metrics compared to those trained on augmented datasets. Among the augmented methods, synonym replacement showed marginally better performance, followed by back translation, random insertion, and paraphrasing; however, the differences between methods were small and not statistically significant. Full article

Background: Proficient second language (L2) reading relies on complex neurocognitive processes. Neuroimaging studies have identified key brain regions recruited during L2 reading, including the left inferior parietal lobule (LIPL) and the calcarine cortex (CAL). The LIPL has been suggested to be involved in phonological decoding during L2 reading, whereas the CAL has been implicated in early-stage visual processing. However, given the correlational nature of neuroimaging techniques, it remains unclear whether these regions play causal roles in L2 reading or are merely epiphenomenal. Methods: To address this issue, the present study used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to modulate neural activity in these regions and eye-tracking technology to assess subsequent reading performance in Chinese–English bilinguals. Specifically, ninety-seven participants were randomly assigned to one of three offline TMS conditions: LIPL, CAL or vertex (as a control site) stimulation, after which they performed a natural sentence reading task in English. Results: The results showed that, compared to the control condition, TMS over the LIPL significantly reduced first fixation duration, whereas no significant effects emerged on gaze duration, regression path reading time, or total reading time. TMS over the CAL produced no significant effects on any eye-movement measures. Conclusions: These findings suggest that the LIPL plays a causal role in L2 reading for early-stage lexical processing through phonological decoding. Overall, this study is the first to employ TMS and eye-tracking to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying natural L2 reading. Full article

This study investigates first language attrition in the interpretation and processing of relative clause attachment ambiguities among instructed late sequential L1 Spanish–L2 English bilinguals. Traditionally, L1 attrition has been associated with limited L1 use and exposure, along with extensive naturalistic immersion. This study questions these conditions as prerequisites of attrition, examining bilinguals who live in an L1 environment but are extensively exposed to their second language in an instructed, classroom-based university setting. Bilinguals were compared with two native control groups of Spanish and English monolinguals. Results from a picture selection task reveal L1 attrition effects in instructed bilinguals, as they rely less frequently on their L1-preferred disambiguation strategy, i.e., high attachment, when resolving ambiguous relative clauses, particularly in comparison to Spanish monolinguals. Instructed bilinguals also exhibit higher processing when processing ambiguous sentences. Additionally, the study explores whether language dominance modulates attrition effects. We consider the implications of these findings for our understanding of grammatical attrition across different input contexts. Full article

This study presents a multimodal deep learning framework for automatic proficiency and style classification of parallel Bilingual Tamil–Hindi learner data. The proposed system employs a dual-headed neural architecture to simultaneously predict proficiency levels (Basic, Advanced) and stylistic categories (Formal, Literary) using shared feature representations. A curated dataset of bilingual text samples is utilized, along with synthetic speech generated through text-to-speech (TTS) to enable controlled multimodal experimentation. Five deep learning architectures are evaluated under text-only, audio-only, and learnable fusion settings. Experimental findings indicate that text-based models consistently achieve strong performance in both proficiency and style classification tasks. In contrast, the audio-only model demonstrates limited effectiveness, highlighting the constraints of synthetic acoustic features in capturing meaningful linguistic information. The fusion models provide only marginal improvements over text-based approaches, suggesting that textual representations play a dominant role in proficiency and stylistic classification within controlled datasets. These results emphasize the importance of linguistic features over acoustic signals for automated language assessment in low-resource settings. The proposed framework provides a scalable and reproducible approach and offers a foundation for future work incorporating real speech data and more diverse linguistic inputs. Full article

Bilingualism has increasingly been understood as a multidimensional and context-sensitive experience, prompting growing interest in how specific aspects of bilingual language use relate to cognition. We used Bayesian psychometric network analysis to examine how bilingual language practices, bicultural identity management, and cognition relate within the same system in a sample of 404 U.S.-born heritage Spanish–English bilingual adults of Latin American descent. This approach conceptualizes bilingualism as a complex system, quantifies uncertainty in the estimated network structure, and identifies aspects of bilingual experience that serve as bridges to cognition and bicultural identity. The strongest bridges between domains were the edge between language mixing and attentional control and the edge between unintended language switching and bicultural harmony. These findings provide a more holistic and socially infused characterization of how bilingualism, biculturalism, and cognition interact in U.S. heritage speakers of Spanish. Full article

Background/Objectives: With growing waves of migration, children speaking a home language different from the language of school literacy have become increasingly common in Western education systems. In this context, understanding and monitoring bilinguals’ reading development is crucial to inform both educational and clinical practices and ensure equitable services. The present study contributes to the literature by investigating learning patterns in single-word reading across primary school grades. Monolingual and bilingual children learning to read in an alphabetic orthography were examined. Methods: The sample consisted of 565 typically developing monolingual and bilingual primary school children from grades 1–5 (bilinguals = 162). Participants completed a computerised Lexical Decision task (LDT) recording accuracy and response times, and standardised tests of reading and cognition. A parental questionnaire was used to gather socio-demographic and linguistic information. Results: Response bias-corrected accuracy rates in the LDT revealed an increase in sensitivity across school years after correcting for potential confounds (SES, vocabulary, nonverbal intelligence). No significant effect of bilingualism was observed. Response times for correct responses also decreased consistently across grades after controlling for the same confounds. Although no significant main effect of bilingualism emerged, an interaction with grade revealed a greater decrease in response times for second-grade bilinguals compared to monolingual peers. Conclusions: Monolingual and bilingual children showed comparable sensitivity rates and reading times, suggesting similar decoding skill acquisition. However, an earlier decrease in response times for bilinguals points to a facilitatory effect in the early stages of reading development, consistent with a bilingual advantage during skill learning. Full article

This study explored language control in phonological encoding during L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) production via two retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) experiments and two bilingual picture–word interference (PWI) experiments with Chinese–English bilinguals. RIF results showed that performance on a target language phonological judgement task can be facilitated by prior picture naming in either the target language or a non-target language in both L2 and L1 production. Bilingual PWI results revealed cross-language phonological facilitation effects in L2 and L1 production. Domain-general cognitive control only moderated effects in L2 tasks. Findings confirmed non-selective phonological activation of translation equivalents and cross-language phonologically related words and supported the Language-Specific Selection Model as the primary language control mechanism in phonological encoding, which restricts competition to the target language. Full article

Background/Objectives: The functional architecture connecting speech production and reading comprehension remains unclear in multilinguals. This study investigated the cross-modal interaction between these systems in trilinguals to resolve the debate between Age of Acquisition (AoA) and usage frequency. Methods: We recruited 144 Uyghur (L1)–Chinese (L2)–English (L3) trilinguals, a population uniquely dissociating acquisition order from social dominance. Participants completed a production-to-comprehension priming paradigm, naming pictures in one language before performing a lexical decision task on translated words. Data were analyzed using linear mixed-effects models. Results: Significant cross-language priming confirmed an integrated lexicon, yet a fundamental asymmetry emerged. The top-down influence of production was governed by AoA; earlier-acquired languages (specifically L1) generated more effective priming signals than L2. Conversely, the bottom-up efficiency of recognition was driven by social usage frequency; the socially dominant L2 was the most receptive target, surpassing the heritage L1. Conclusions: The trilingual lexicon operates via “Two Rules”: a history-driven production system (AoA) and an environment-driven recognition system (Social Usage). This asymmetrical baseline challenges simple bilingual extensions and clarifies the dynamics of multilingual language control. Full article

As drones become increasingly integrated into civilian and industrial domains, the demand for natural and accessible control interfaces continues to grow. Conventional manual controllers require technical expertise and impose cognitive overhead, limiting their usability in dynamic and time-critical scenarios. To address these limitations, this paper presents a multilingual voice-driven control framework for quadrotor drones, enabling real-time operation in both English and Arabic. The proposed architecture combines offline Speech-to-Text (STT) processing with large language models (LLMs) to interpret spoken commands and translate them into executable control code. Specifically, Vosk is employed for bilingual STT, while Google Gemini provides semantic disambiguation, contextual inference, and code generation. The system is designed for continuous, low-latency operation within an edge–cloud hybrid configuration, offering an intuitive and robust human–drone interface. While speech recognition and safety validation are processed entirely offline, high-level reasoning and code generation currently rely on cloud-based LLM inference. Experimental evaluation demonstrates an average speech recognition accuracy of 95% and end-to-end command execution latency between 300 and 500 ms, validating the feasibility of reliable, multilingual, voice-based UAV control. This research advances multimodal human–robot interaction by showcasing the integration of offline speech recognition and LLMs for adaptive, safe, and scalable aerial autonomy. Full article

This study investigated factors predicting cognitive flexibility in Chinese–English bilinguals, with a comprehensive focus on demographic and language-related variables. Cognitive flexibility was assessed using reaction times (RTs) and maximum absolute deviation (MAD) in a mouse-tracking nonverbal task-switching paradigm, capturing both mix and switch costs. Regression analyses revealed that bilingual experience explained a larger proportion of variance in mix costs than in switch costs, with stronger effects for MAD than RTs. Higher composite factor scores (CFS) were positively associated with mix costs, whereas balanced language use across life stages, activities, and interlocutors predicted smaller mix costs, suggesting a move to multi-dimensional, experience-based approaches. In contrast, switch costs were largely unrelated to CFS, but balanced language use across situational contexts, which predicted reduced switch costs in MAD, indicating enhanced reactive control. Moreover, bilingual experiences in the home environment appeared to be positively associated with cognitive flexibility. These findings highlight the multidimensional nature of bilingual experience and underscore the value of movement trajectory measures in capturing subtle effects on sustained and transient cognitive control. Full article

Background: Children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) commonly experience executive function (EF) impairments that impact daily life and academics. While bilingualism has generally been associated with cognitive advantages in typically developing (TD) children, its relationship with EF in children with NDDs remains unclear and represents a critical knowledge gap for families and clinicians considering bilingual exposure in these populations. Methods: For this scoping review, we searched PubMed, ProQuest, CogNet, PsycINFO, Scopus, ERIC, Embase, CINAHL, Linguistics Abstracts Online, and Google Scholar for studies published between database inception and December 2024, without language restrictions. We included quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods studies that (i) involved participants aged 4–12 years with diagnosed NDDs; (ii) examined children with bilingual language exposure; (iii) employed validated instruments for measuring cognitive or executive function; (iv) presented original empirical findings; and (v) were published in English. We excluded studies lacking comparisons between groups and longitudinal studies. Data on study characteristics, participants, EF assessments, and main findings were extracted. This study is registered with OSF Registries. Findings: Fifteen cross-sectional studies met the inclusion criteria, all of which focused exclusively on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with no studies examining other NDDs. The studies involved 982 children with ASD (463 monolingual; 404 bilingual) and 644 TD children. Most studies (n = 11) revealed that, compared with monolingual children with ASD, bilingual children with ASD demonstrated advantages in working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control on performance-based tasks. However, findings were inconsistent for spatial inhibition tasks, and parent-reported measures sometimes failed to detect bilingual-related differences. Interpretation: Bilingualism is associated with specific EF benefits for children with ASD, adding to evidence that questions longstanding concerns about the negative impacts of bilingual exposure in NDD populations. The evidence suggests that bilingual exposure could potentially serve as a complementary approach to traditional interventions for addressing EF impairments in children with ASD, although this evidence is limited to cross-sectional designs and requires further studies. However, the exclusive focus on ASD limits generalisability across the broader spectrum of NDDs. Further research is needed across diverse NDD populations employing comprehensive, multi-method EF assessments that combine performance-based tasks with parent-reported measures to better inform parenting, clinical, and educational practices. Full article

As global obesity rates rise, cardiovascular diseases increase, and stress-related issues become more severe. This increases the public awareness of health and exercise. However, existing spinning fitness equipment lacks personalized customization for individual needs. To address this, we developed a smart customizable spinning system that enables health monitoring, central computation, flywheel, voice interaction, notification, and query subsystems. Users can set fitness goals based on their personal needs, monitor workout data via sensors, and utilize voice interaction and control to track their exercise status in real time. The system notifies users of workout progress through a buzzer and message queuing telemetry transport, while the Web interface provides access to past workouts and health records. Additionally, the system supports bilingual functionality (Chinese and English), allowing users to operate it in their preferred language, enhancing global usability. Full article