1. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Judith McLaughin1, Lee Osterhout2 & Albert Kim3
Brief Communication
Nature Neuroscience, Volume 7 Number 7, Jul 2004
123
Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab (University of Washington)
http://faculty.washington.edu/losterho/research1.htm
What's
good, if
brief, twice
good
Presenter: Gabriel Guillen
LIN 275 NEUROBIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE

2. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Popular claim
Adult Second Language (L2) learning is supposed to be slower and harder than
native First Language (L1) acquisition. My claim: However, L2 instructors and
learners tend to see more progress during the first stages of learning (example:
Beginning Spanish 1 compared to Beginning Spanish 3).
Research Question
How much exposure to L2 do we need before the brain (activity) reflects the
lexical status and meaning of L2 words?

3. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Participants
-18 college students (mean age: 21.3 years) studying French for the first time
(although they had at least one year of experience with other foreign
languages). They also used 8 nonlearners (27.6 years) as control group.
-The experiment was longitudinal: 9 months (126-150 hours of instruction).
-Did they measure ERPs among learners before session 1?
"By session 3, learners' ERP responses were qualitatively similar to analogous
native language responses" (p704)... Remember note 5 (Chwilla et al 1995).

4. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
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Method (ERPs + lexicality judgments) keinmal
First, they used event-related potentials (ERPs).
http://faculty.washington.edu/losterho/erp_tutorial.htm
ERPs are positive and negative electrical fluctuations related to sensory, motor,
or cognitive events (stimulus). In order to represent ERPs, polarity and peak
latency (in milliseconds) are used.

5. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Method (ERPs + lexicality judgments)
-As it is common practice, they focused on the N400 component. The N400
peaks at 400 ms after the visual presentation of a word.
-The N400 is sensitive to lexical status (word or pseudoword) and word
meaning. It is larger for legal pseudo-words (mot, nasier), intermediate for
unrelated words (maison, soif) and smaller for related words (chien, chat).
mot, nasier (pseudoword)
chien, chat (cat, related)
maison, soif (thirst, unrelated)

6. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Method (ERPs + lexicality judgments)
-They had 3 sessions during the 9 months:
Session 1: 5-28 hours of instruction (mean: 14 hours)
Session 2: 59-57 hours of instruction (mean: 63 hours)
Session 3: 126-150 hours of instruction (mean: 138 hours)
-Is it self-reported?
-The stimuli were 2 lists of 112 prime-target pairs of words (40 semantically
related, 40 unrelated and 32 pseudowords).
chien, chat (cat, related) maison, soif (thirst, unrelated)
mot, nasier (pseudoword)

7. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Method (ERPs + lexicality judgments)
-The prime and target words were the most frequent? adjectives, nouns and
verbs from the assigned textbook. Pseudowords came from the textbook but
they replaced one or two central letters.
-The researchers had just 2 lists so they repeated lists -the list in session 1 was
repeated for session 3.
Lexical sensitivity: d'
-Participants were not passive. They had to make lexical decisions.
Is it a word or a non-word?
-They measured the lexical sensitivity from 0 (no sensitivity) to 4 (near-perfect
sensitivity, recognize all or almost all of the target words).
d'= z (h) - z(fa)
z(h) proportion of real words identified as words (hits)
z(fa) proportion of non-words identifed as words (false alarms)

8. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-The lexical sensitivity index (d') was near 0 for learners and nonlearners.
Bad news? C'mon, they are still beginners...
-In fact, learners show "moderate increases in sensitivity during session 2 and
3" (p703).

9. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-They did not find N400 amplitude modulations
for nonlearners.
-Personal question: why do we find negative
polarity for Session 2 and 3 and not for Session 1?
-At any case, notice there is no significant
difference between pseudo-words, related words
and unrelated words with nonlearners.

10. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-Among learners, pseudo-words elicited larger N400
than unrelated or related words.
-"By session 3, learners' ERP responses were
qualitatively similar to analogous native language
responses" (704)

11. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-According to the authors, the most remarkable
finding is the N400 effect for word and pseudo-words
after just 14 hours of instruction.

12. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-Is there a real correlation between N400 differences in session 1 and hours of
instruction?
-They regressed the N400 differences and d' scores with the hours of
instruction before session 1.

13. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Results
-Caveat. Was there a smaller mean grapheme co-ocurrence values for the
pseudowords? In other words, letter and sounds combinations that were less
frequent? They computed the frequencies and there were no bigram (2 letter
together, i.e. th) or trigram frequency differences between words and
pseudowords. There was a difference for quadragram frequency but the
associate it with target
word frequency.

14. Neural correlates of second language word learning:
minimal instruction produces rapid change
Conclusions
-After minimal instruction, adult L2 beginners show significant knowledge
about L2 words (word form first and word meaning after).
-ERPs to words and pseudo-word show this "early learning" before the lexicality
judgements.
-Ergo... "adult L2 learning is not uniformly slow and laborious" (704). In fact,
"certain aspects of the language are acquired with remarkable speed" (704).
-Also, ERPs seem to be more accurate than explicit or categorical assessments,
such as the lexicality judgments.
-This method can be used (is used) with L1-L2 similarity, instructional methods
and age.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%
22neural+correlates+of+second+language%22&as_sdt=1%
2C5&as_ylo=2004&as_vis=0