Ikerbasque researcher: Arthur Samuel
My primary research focus is now on examining how two languages can co-exist in one brain
What research are you currently carrying out in the Basque Country?
My research is primarily about spoken word recognition. Humans are uniquely capable of conveying extremely complex and novel messages using speech, and despite a half century of excellent scientific work, many fundamental questions remain about how people can do this. If you have tried to use one of the commercially-available speech recognition systems (or worse yet, one of the automated phone response systems when you call a company), you are familiar with how difficult this problem seems to be: Even the best such system is much, much worse than any normal human is at understanding the words that are being spoken. My research is part of ongoing efforts to specify how the complex acoustic signal that enters the ear ultimately allows the listener to recognize the words that the speaker has uttered.In recent years, much of my research has focused on two aspects of the word recognition system: (1) How does the listener use pre-existing knowledge of words to complement the incoming acoustic signal?, and (2) How do listeners adapt when they encounter a speaker with an unusual accent, or some other way of speaking that makes the input signal a poor match to the representations of words that exist in the listener’s brain?The initial work I have done here in the Basque Country focuses on the first of these questions, and it is based on a perceptual effect called the “phonemic restoration” illusion. The effect is produced by splicing out one or two consonants or vowels from a spoken word, and replacing that stretch of sound with white noise. Despite the missing sounds, listeners typically insist that they hear the word as being intact – they seem to perceptually restore the missing sound. My initial work here examines the extent to which this perceptual illusion is stronger for words in a bilingual’s first/native language than in words in a second language. This is part of a broader investigation of how automatic processes operate during speech perception, and how much they depend on knowledge that is established through early exposure to a language. The results of this research program will help to inform us about how much achieving native-level performance depends on early language exposure.
The Basque Country is a bilingual society, how has this influenced your research?
The unique linguistic environment of the Basque Country has had a huge impact on my research. For the last 35 years, I conducted studies of language comprehension with monolingual American listeners. Although those studies were certainly informative, they failed to account for the fact that monolingualism is not the norm for language use: With over 6000 languages used in about 200 countries, bilingualism (or multilingualism) is more common. As such, to really understand how language comprehension works, we must understand how multiple language systems co-exist and interact within one brain.The fact that the Basque Country is completely bilingual offers special opportunities for research in this domain, and I am eagerly taking advantage of these opportunities. For a language researcher, there is truly special property available here: Spanish and Basque are completely unrelated languages (other than, of course, some cognates that have developed over the years) – they have totally different syntactic systems, and ways of constructing words (morphology). As such, research on bilingual language use can proceed without worrying about having cross-talk between the languages. Because of this, my primary research focus is now on examining how two languages can co-exist in one brain, and what the cognitive and perceptual consequences are for this co-existence. There is some fascinating recent research that suggests that being bilingual produces cognitive advantages in the ability to deal with complex stimuli (beyond language itself), and may even lead to a significant delay in the development of age-related dementia. We will be conducting a series of experiments that are intended to explore the cognitive consequences of bilingualism.
How has the acceptance of the offer from Ikerbasque influenced your scientific-research career?
After the experience of only a matter of months it is difficult to draw broad conclusions about how my career has been affected by becoming an Ikerbasque Research Professor. However, my experiences so far lead me to believe that this change will have the effect I was seeking: As a researcher at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language (BCBL) I have access to exceptional facilities, exceptional colleagues, and as noted above, an exceptional population for my research. Moreover, I now get to spend the vast majority of my time actually doing my research. This is a most welcome development, and it contrasts sharply with my experiences as a faculty member at a university where the administrative requirements (I was a department Chair) and teaching left much less time to do my own research. There is a really unusual concentration of talent at a Center like BCBL, with many world-class researchers focused on a particular topic (Language). This rarely, if ever, happens in a university department, and it offers the opportunity to expand into new and potentially fruitful directions. For example, our Center has very talented people with experience using the tools of Cognitive Neuroscience, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). Having access to such colleagues and equipment is leading me to design targeted experiments in cognitive neuroscience to complement the behavioral experiments that are the main focus of my work. I see this as a very exciting new direction to my research career.