Guillaume Thierry

Bangor University · School of Psychology

In the alternative uses task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2–3 min timeframe. While idea evaluation is likely involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation. Here, we test the value of presenting a word overlapping an image compared to a word o...

Taza in Spanish refers to cups and mugs in English, whereas glass refers to different glass types in Spanish: copa and vaso . It is still unclear whether such categorical distinctions induce early perceptual differences in speakers of different languages. In this study, for the first time, we report symmetrical effects of terminology on preattentiv...

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Using event‐related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment correlates...

Prior research suggests that bilinguals show reduced sensitivity to negative content when operating in the second language (L2). The available evidence, however, is limited to language comprehension. We tested the production of emotional words in Polish (L1)–English (L2) bilinguals in two EEG studies that manipulated emotional cueing. In Experiment...

In the Alternate Uses Task (AUT), a well-established creativity assessment, participants propose alternative uses for common items (e.g., a brick) within a 2-3-minute timeframe. While idea selection (convergent thinking) is involved, the emphasis is strongly on idea generation (divergent thinking). Here, we test the value of presenting a word overl...

Speakers of Mandarin Chinese are thought to conceptualise time along the vertical axis—as evidence for metaphor embodiment—but the extant behavioural evidence remains unclear. Here, we used electrophysiology to test space–time conceptual relationships implicitly in native speakers of Chinese. We employed a modified arrow flanker task, in which the...

It is now well established that reading words in a second language (L2) automatically activates native language (L1) translations in bilinguals. Although there is evidence that access to such representations is inhibited when words have a negative emotional valence, the mechanism underlying such inhibition is elusive, and it is unknown whether inhi...

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing two‐eve...

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Here, using event-related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment corr...

Languages vary considerably in how they group objects into categories. For example, the word taza in Spanish can refer to either cup or mug in English, whereas glass can refer to either copa or vaso – two different types of glasses –, in Spanish. It is still debated whether such language distinctions cause differences in early perceptual processing...

Previous research has shown that positive and negative moods differently modulate lexico-semantic processes. However, little is known about effects of mood on creative meaning comprehension in bilinguals. Here, Polish -English (L1-L2) female bilinguals made meaningfulness judgments on L1 and L2 novel metaphoric, literal, and anomalous sentences dur...

Embodied theories of cognition suggest that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has suggested that, like concrete concepts, abstract concepts such as time, morality, or power are embodied in relation to the vertical axis in space, albeit to a weaker extent. However, it is less clear whether such mapping applies i...

Human neonates can discriminate phonemes, but the neural mechanism underlying this ability is poorly understood. Here we show that the neonatal brain can learn to discriminate natural vowels from backward vowels, a contrast unlikely to have been learnt in the womb. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we examined the neuroplastic changes ca...

Previous electrophysiological (EEG) research has shown that positive and negative moods (i.e., affective background states of low intensity) may differently modulate semantic processes in the native language (L1) (Chwilla et al., 2011). Accumulating evidence from bilingual speakers, however, has only pointed to dampened sensitivity to affective sti...

Previous monolingual event-related potential (ERP) studies have often suggested that positive and negative moods differently modulate lexico-semantic processes. However, little is known about how mood influences creative meaning construction, as reflected in novel metaphoric meaning comprehension, and how this effect is modulated by the native (L1)...

Positive and negative moods tend to have differential effects on lexico-semantic processing in the native language (L1). Though accumulating evidence points to dampened sensitivity to affective stimuli in the non-native language (L2), little is known about the effects of positive and negative moods on L2 processing. Here, we show that lexico-semant...

In early childhood, the human brain goes through a period of tuning to native speech sounds but retains remarkable flexibility, allowing the learning of new languages throughout life. However, little is known about the stability over time of early neural specialization for speech and its influence on the formation of novel language representations....

"Linguistic relativity: can we think in Spanish living in a non-Hispanic environment?" The language we use to communicate with others has tight links with the way we think and how we perceive the world around us. Hence learning to think in another language involves cognitive changes that go beyond the linguistic use and command of the language. We...

Background The neural networks underpinning language control and domain-general executive functions overlap in bilinguals, but existing evidence is mainly correlative. Here, we present the first neurofunctional evidence for a transfer effect between (domain-general) inhibitory control and language control through training. We trained Chinese–Englis...

Here, we used event-related potentials to test the predictions of two prominent accounts of code-switching in bilinguals: The Matrix Language Framework (MLF; Myers-Scotton, 1993) and an application of the Minimalist Programme (MP; Cantone and MacSwan, 2009). We focused on the relative order of the noun with respect to the adjective in mixed Welsh–E...

Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single‐language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed‐language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and...

Background: The neural networks underpinning language control and domain-general executive functions overlap in bilinguals, but existing evidence is mainly correlative. Here, we present the first neurofunctional evidence for a transfer effect between (domain-general) inhibitory control and language control through training. We trained Chinese-Engli...

Building on initiatives to promote high quality methodologies and Open Science practices in the language sciences, Language Learning will introduce, as of March 2020, a new manuscript type entitled Methods Showcase Articles (MSAs). The purpose of MSAs is to introduce new or emerging qualitative and quantitative methods, techniques, or instrumentati...

Individuals who acquire a second language (L2) after infancy often retain features of their native language (L1) accent. Cross-language priming studies have shown negative effects of L1 accent on L2 comprehension, but the role of specific speech features, such as lexical stress, is mostly unknown. Here, we investigate whether lexical stress and acc...

In order to determine whether preference in object matching tasks measures participants' strategy or tells us something about the salience of relations between corresponding concepts, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we approached this question by measuring the ease with which adult participants process different re...

Research has suggested that using two or more languages on a daily basis helps older adults maintain a heightened functional state and improves neurocomputational efficiency. In this review, we discuss studies that have examined the effect of life-long bilingualism on age-related cognitive and neural decline, with a focus on discrepancies between d...

It is commonly accepted that bilinguals access lexical representations from their two languages during language comprehension, even when they operate in a single language context. Language detection mechanisms are, thus, hypothesized to operate after the stage of lexical access during visual word recognition. However, recent studies showed reduced...

Building on initiatives to promote high quality methodologies and Open Science practices in the language sciences, Language Learning will request, as of January 1, 2020, that all submissions to the journal include, whenever possible, the full materials used in the study for peer review. This includes materials used to elicit and code primary and se...

In linguistics, the relationship between phonological word form and meaning is mostly considered arbitrary. Why, then, do literary authors traditionally craft sound relationships between words? We set out to characterise how dynamic interactions between word form and meaning may account for this literary practice. Here, we show that alliteration in...

Investigations of the so-called 'foreign language effect' have shown that emotional experience is language-dependent in bilingual individuals. Response to negative experiences, in particular, appears attenuated in the second language (L2). However, the human brain is not only reactive, it builds on past experiences to anticipate future events. Here...

The ability to conceive time is a corner stone of human cognition. It is unknown, however, whether time conceptualisation differs depending on language of operation in bilinguals. Whilst both Chinese and English cultures associate the future with the front space, some temporal expressions of Chinese involve a configuration reversal due to historic...

The human brain can learn contingencies built into stimulus sequences unconsciously. The quality of such implicit learning has been connected to stimulus social relevance, but results so far are inconsistent. We engaged participants in an implicit-intentional learning task in which they learned to discriminate between legal and illegal card triads...

Previous studies have shown spontaneous activation of the native language (L1) in late bilinguals tested in their second language. On the other hand, prosodic information is known to influence lexical access in spoken word comprehension. Therefore, although it has never been demonstrated, it is likely that the segmental and suprasegmental propertie...

Linguistic relativity effects arising from differences in terminology and syntax between languages have now been established in various domains of human cognition. Although metaphors have been shown to affect time conceptualisation, there is little evidence to date that the presence or absence of tense within a given language can affect how one pro...

In their paper “Do Bilinguals Automatically Activate Their Native Language When They Are Not Using it?”, Costa, Pannunzi, Deco, and Pickering (Cognitive Science, 2017) proposed a reinterpretation of Thierry and Wu's (2004, 2007) finding of native language‐based (Chinese, L1) ERP effects when they tested Chinese–English late bilinguals exclusively i...

Intuitively, deriving meaning from an abstract image is a uniquely human, idiosyncratic experience. Here we show that, despite having no universally recognised lexical association, abstract images spontaneously elicit specific concepts conveyed by words, with a consistency akin to that of concrete images. We presented a group of naïve participants...

Some studies in experimental pragmatics have concluded that scalar inferences (e.g., ‘some X are Y’ implicates ‘not all X are Y’) are context-dependent pragmatic computations delayed relative to semantic computations. However, it remains unclear whether strong contextual support is necessary to trigger such inferences. Here we tested if the scalar...

Traditional theories of backward priming account only for the priming effects found at long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Here, we suggest that the presence of backward priming at short SOAs may be related to the integrative role of the cerebellum. Previous research has shown that the right cerebellum is involved in forward associative primin...

According to the Grain Size Accommodation hypothesis (Lallier & Carreiras, 2017), learning to read in two languages differing in orthographic consistency leads to a cross-linguistic modulation of reading and spelling processes. Here, we test the prediction that bilingualism may influence the manifestations of dyslexia. We compared the deficits of E...

In their paper "Do bilinguals automatically activate their native language when they are not using it?", Costa, Pannunzi, Deco, and Pickering (Cognitive Science, 2016) proposed a reinterpretation of Thierry and Wu's (2004, 2007) finding of native language-based (Chinese, L1) ERP effects when they tested Chinese-English late bilinguals exclusively i...

Some studies in experimental pragmatics have concluded that scalar inferences (e.g., 'some X are Y' implicates 'not all X are Y') are context-dependent pragmatic computations delayed relative to semantic computations. However, it remains unclear whether strong contextual support is necessary to trigger such inferences. Here we tested if the scalar...

In a non-randomized controlled study, we investigated the efficacy of a school-based mindfulness curriculum delivered by schoolteachers to older secondary school students (16–18 years). We measured changes in emotion processing indexed by P3b event-related potential (ERP) modulations in an affective oddball task using static human faces. ERPs were...

Recent studies have revealed remarkable interactions between language and emotion. Here, we show that such interactions influence judgments made regarding cultural information. Balanced Welsh–English bilinguals categorized statements about their native Welsh culture as true or false. Whilst participants categorized positive statements as true when...

Studies of language production in bilinguals have seldom considered the fact that language selection likely involves proactive control. Here, we show that Chinese-English bilinguals actively inhibit the language not-to-be used before the onset of a picture to be named. Depending on the nature of a directive cue, participants named a subsequent pict...

The power of poetry is universally acknowledged, but it is debatable whether its appreciation is reserved for experts. Here, we show that readers with no particular knowledge of a traditional form of Welsh poetry unconsciously distinguish phrases conforming to its complex poetic construction rules from those that violate them. We studied the brain...

In sentence verification tasks involving under-informative statements such as Some elephants are mammals, some adults appear more tolerant to pragmatic violations than others. The underlying causes of such inter-individual variability remain however essentially unknown. Here, we investigated inter-individual variation in adults deriving the scalar...

Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that one subject should be taught in only one language and one person should stick to one language in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and monolingual functioning on memory performance in im...

The time has come, perhaps, to go beyond merely acknowledging that language is a core manifestation of the workings of the human mind and that it relates interactively to all aspects of thinking. The issue, thus, is not to decide whether language and human thought may be ineluctably linked (they just are), but rather to determine what the character...

Neurobilingualism research has failed to reveal significant language differences in the processing of affective content. However, the evidence to date derives mostly from studies in which affective stimuli are presented out of context, which is unnatural and fails to capture the complexity of everyday sentence-based communication. Here we investiga...

New evidence is accumulating for a deficit in binding visual-orthographic information with the corresponding phonological code in developmental dyslexia. Here, we identify the mechanisms underpinning this deficit using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in dyslexic and control adult readers performing a letter-matching task. In each trial, a pri...

In this study we explore whether world knowledge (WK) processing differs between individuals listening to their native (L1) or their non-native (L2) language. We recorded event-related brain potentials in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish while they listened to sentences uttered by native speakers of Spanish. Sentences were either congruent or incongru...

Overview The results from both repetition priming (Nickels, 2002) and incidental novel vocabulary acquisition tasks (Breitenstein et al., 2004) have been applied to make inferences about mechanisms of aphasia recovery. There is great potential for tDCS as an adjunct to aphasia rehabilitation (Crinion, 2016) but we require a clearer understanding of...

These questions were posed by the editors and contributors after Guillaume Thierry had read drafts of the chapters. General questions 1 Does bilingualism research reveal anything about the human mind that we wouldn’t otherwise know if we were studying only monolinguals? I believe that time for speculative, contemplative research is running out. Not...

In order to study the difficulties experienced during sentence comprehension in a foreign language (L2), we investigated semantic and world knowledge information retrieval in L2 comprehenders. Event-related potentials (ERP) were collected in late learners of English whose native language is Spanish, performing a sentence reading task in English. We...

A number of studies have shown that from an early age, bilinguals outperform their monolingual peers on executive control tasks. We previously found that bilingual children and adults also display greater attention to unexpected language switches within speech. Here, we investigated the effect of a bilingual upbringing on speech perception in one l...

In bilingual communities, mixing languages is avoided in formal schooling: even if two languages are used on a daily basis for teaching, only one language is used to teach each given academic subject. This tenet known as the one subject-one language rule avoids mixing languages in formal schooling because it may hinder learning. The aim of this stu...

The present study investigated how pragmatic information is integrated during L2 sentence comprehension. We put forward that the differences often observed between L1 and L2 sentence processing may reflect differences on how various types of information are used to process a sentence, and not necessarily differences between native and non-native li...

Recent studies have identified neural correlates of language effects on perception in static domains of experience such as colour and objects. The generalization of such effects to dynamic domains like motion events remains elusive. Here, we focus on grammatical differences between languages relevant for the description of motion events and their i...

Research into language-emotion interactions has revealed intriguing cognitive inhibition effects by emotionally negative words in bilinguals. Here, we turn to the domain of human risk taking and show that the experience of positive recency in games of chance-the "hot hand" effect-is diminished when game outcomes are provided in a second language ra...

Numerous studies have shown that bilinguals presented with words in one of their languages spontaneously and automatically activate lexical representations from their other language. However, such effects, found in varied experimental contexts, both in behavioural and psychophysiological investigations, have been essentially limited to the lexical-...

Initial research shows that mindfulness training can enhance attention and modulate the affective response. However, links between mindfulness and language processing remain virtually unexplored despite the prominent role of overt and silent negative ruminative speech in depressive and anxiety-related symptomatology. Here, we measured dispositional...

Language has been shown to influence non-linguistic cognitive operations such as colour perception, object categorization, and motion event perception. Here, we show that language also modulates higher level processing, such as semantic knowledge. Using event-related brain potentials, we show that highly fluent Welsh-English bilinguals require sign...

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events accordin...

A fundamental question in language development is how infants start to assign meaning to words. Here, using three EEG-based measures of brain activity, we establish that preverbal 11-month-old infants are sensitive to the non-arbitrary correspondences between language sounds and concepts, that is, to sound symbolism. In each trial, infant participa...

The debate on the existence of free will is on-going. Seminal findings by Libet et al. (1983) demonstrate that subjective awareness of a voluntary urge to act (the W-judgment) occurs before action execution. Libet’s paradigm requires participants to perform voluntary actions while watching a clock hand rotate. On response trials, participants make...

Each human language possesses a set of distinctive syntactic rules. Here, we show that balanced Welsh-English bilinguals reading in English unconsciously apply a morphosyntactic rule that only exists in Welsh. The Welsh soft mutation rule determines whether the initial consonant of a noun changes based on the grammatical context (e.g., the feminine...

Linguistic relativity theory has received empirical support in domains such as color perception and object categorization. It is unknown, however, whether relations between words idiosyncratic to language impact non-verbal representations and conceptualizations. For instance, would one consider the concepts of horse and sea as related were it not f...

Do the integration of semantic information and that of world knowledge occur simultaneously or in sequence during sentence processing? To address this question, we investigated event-related brain potentials elicited by the critical word of English sentences in three conditions: (1) correct; (2) semantic violation; (3) world knowledge violation (se...

Language non-selective lexical access in bilinguals has been established mainly using tasks requiring explicit language processing. Here, we show that bilinguals activate native language translations even when words presented in their second language are incidentally processed in a nonverbal, visual search task. Chinese-English bilinguals searched...

Mastering two languages has been associated with enhancement in human executive control, but previous studies of this phenomenon have exclusively relied on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual individuals. In the present study, we tested a single group of Welsh-English bilinguals engaged in a nonverbal conflict resolution task and manipula...

Reading action verbs is associated with activity in the motor cortices involved in performing the corresponding actions. Here, we present new evidence that the motor cortex is involved in semantic processing of bodily action verbs. In contrast to previous studies, we used a direct, nonbehavioural index of semantic processing after repetitive transc...

Recent streams of research support the Whorfian hypothesis according to which language affects one's perception of the world. However, studies of object categorization in different languages have heavily relied on behavioral measures that are fuzzy and inconsistent. Here, we provide the first electrophysiological evidence for unconscious effects of...

Grapheme-to-phoneme mapping regularity is thought to determine the grain size of orthographic information extracted whilst encoding letter strings. Here we tested whether learning to read in two languages differing in their orthographic transparency yields different strategies used for encoding letter-strings as compared to learning to read in one...

A bilingual upbringing has been shown to enhance executive control, but the neural mechanisms underpinning such effect are essentially unknown. Here, we investigated whether monolingual and bilingual toddlers differ in semantic processing efficiency and their allocation of attention to expected and unexpected visual stimuli. We simultaneously recor...

Résumé Il est aujourd’hui communément accepté que l’accès au lexique ne soit pas sélectif à la langue en cours d’utilisation. En revanche, les connaissances dans le domaine de la syntaxe sont beaucoup moins avancées. Des études observationnelles de production ont rapporté de nombreux exemples d’emprunts syntaxiques entre langues chez l’enfant bilin...

Behavioral studies with proficient late bilinguals have revealed the existence of orthographic neighborhood density (ND) effects across languages when participants read either in their first (L1) or second (L2) language. Words with many cross-language (CL) neighbors have been found to elicit more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) than words...

The goal of this study was to gain a better understanding of the relationship between non-verbal auditory disorders and developmental dyslexia. This question has led to conflicting results in the literature, which we argued might be due to a failure to consider the heterogeneity of dyslexic profiles. This study included three groups of adult partic...

Does language modulate perception and categorisation of everyday objects? Here, we approach this question from the perspective of grammatical gender in bilinguals. We tested Spanish-English bilinguals and control native speakers of English in a semantic categorisation task on triplets of pictures in an all-in-English context while measuring event-r...