OBJECTIVE:This study aims to investigate the relationship between children's multilingualism, immigration background, and their attention difficulties, as well as the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses. METHODS:Questionnaire data on 70,102 children from the Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), including parental ratings of attention difficulties (Child Behavior Checklist, Parent/Teacher Rating Scale for Disruptive Behavior Disorders) and multilingual language use, was linked with registry data from the Norwegian Patient Registry concerning ADHD diagnoses. RESULTS:Our findings indicate that multilingual children exhibited higher ratings of attention difficulties compared to their monolingual peers. However, the prevalence of ADHD diagnoses did not show significant differences based on multilingualism or parental language background. Nevertheless, there are indications that children with mothers from North Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Oceania may be at risk of being underdiagnosed for ADHD in Norway. In addition, girls whose mothers spoke a native language other than Norwegian were diagnosed with ADHD significantly later than girls with native Norwegian-speaking mothers. CONCLUSION:Our results raise concerns about the validity of parental questionnaires, such as the Child Behavior Checklist, in assessing attention difficulties across various cultural and linguistic backgrounds, as well as the overall quality of ADHD evaluations for these children. The delayed ADHD diagnoses among daughters of immigrant mothers highlight potential systemic inequalities within the Norwegian healthcare system, emphasizing the need for linguistically and culturally sensitive assessment tools to better support neurodiverse children from diverse backgrounds.

Understanding irony requires epistemic vigilance towards both the content and source of communication. We conducted two experiments to investigate whether children's early epistemic vigilance abilities aid in detecting verbal irony. The first experiment focused on children's vigilance towards utterance content, hypothesizing that utterances whose explicit (or literal) content is more inappropriate in the context would be easier to recognize as ironic. The second experiment examined children's vigilance towards the source of the utterances, hypothesizing that children would find ironic (but literally accurate) informants more trustworthy than inaccurate ones. Both tasks proved challenging for 3- to 7-year-olds, providing no direct evidence of irony understanding. While adults performed as predicted in the first experiment, they did not trust ironic (but accurate) informants, suggesting that the trustworthiness paradigm may not suit the complexity of verbal irony, where the speaker is both dismissive and correct. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the role of epistemic vigilance in irony development.

Semantic integration is a mechanism of lexical-semantic processing. When indexed by N400, it emerges coupled with the vocabulary spurt in the second year. To what extent maturation and language exposure contribute to its development remains unclear. Bilingual toddlers split their time between two languages. While experiencing similar concepts as monolinguals, bilinguals are less exposed to each language's words. This makes them a key group to disentangle the relative contribution of maturation and language exposure in the emergence of semantic integration. We investigate (1) whether bilinguals follow the same developmental trajectory of semantic integration as monolinguals, and (2) whether semantic integration differs between bilinguals' dominant and non-dominant languages across time. If language exposure drives semantic integration, we expect earlier timing of onset of semantic integration in monolinguals than bilinguals and language-dominance effects within bilinguals. In this event-related potential mixed longitudinal and cross-sectional study (N=131), bilingual and monolingual 18- and 24-month-olds were shown a picture-word priming-paradigm. We found N400 effect at 18 and 24 months in monolinguals. Bilinguals showed no evidence of N400 effect in either the dominant or non-dominant language at any time-point. Although the bilingual sample was smaller than planned, our results contribute to general neurodevelopmental and dual language acquisition models.

OBJECTIVE:ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts pragmatic communication abilities in children, including their understanding of verbal irony. This study aims to investigate whether adults with ADHD experience similar challenges in interpreting ironic statements, and to examine the role of executive attention abilities in accounting for any observed differences. METHODS:52 adults with ADHD and 55 neurotypical controls participated in an eye-tracking experiment. They read stories that included either literal or ironic statements and answered targeted comprehension questions. We used measures of working memory and fluid intelligence as independent indices of executive attention. RESULTS:The results showed that adults with ADHD were as accurate as the control group in comprehending irony. However, they experienced an additional processing cost, indicated by increased reading times for ironic statements. While fluid intelligence improved comprehension accuracy in the control group, it did not have the same effect for participants with ADHD. Importantly, higher working memory capacity in adults with ADHD was associated with faster processing times, making their irony processing comparable to that of the control group. CONCLUSION:Our findings underscore the subtle challenges adults with ADHD face in processing irony and highlight the crucial role of working memory in enhancing performance. These insights stress the importance of considering individual cognitive capacities and their interaction with ADHD symptoms to better understand how ADHD impacts pragmatic abilities in adulthood.

Predicting upcoming linguistic input is an important skill that facilitates efficient comprehension and may support language acquisition. While previous research has examined different cues children use to anticipate upcoming words, findings remain dispersed across studies, and the developmental trajectory of predictive abilities is not fully understood. This systematic review synthesizes empirical studies investigating auditory language prediction in typically developing children and identifies patterns and gaps in the literature. Following PRISMA guidelines, 53 studies published between 1999 and 2024 were identified, with a total sample size of 2505 children. These studies report on 67 experiments which all employed eye-tracking using the Visual World Paradigm to examine prediction. The findings highlight that children can predict language using a variety of semantic, morphosyntactic, phonological and prosodic cues. While predictive ability generally improves with age, the developmental timeline varies by cue type, with some cues (e.g., restrictive verbs, grammatical gender) being used earlier than others (e.g., adjectives and spatial deixis). Research spans 14 languages, with many understudied languages, particularly non-Indo-European languages. The role of individual differences in children's predictive ability remains largely inconclusive, with need for further investigation. Avenues for future research are also the integration of multiple predictive cues, how prediction operates in complex linguistic contexts, and how bilingualism influences predictive processing. Additionally, methodological transparency, including open data practices, is not yet widespread in this field. Addressing these gaps will provide a more comprehensive understanding of children's predictive language processing and its role in language development.

The comprehension of irony involves a sophisticated inferential process requiring language users to go beyond the literal meaning of an utterance. Because of its complex nature, we hypothesized that working memory (WM) and fluid intelligence, the two main components of executive attention, would be involved in the understanding of irony: the former by maintaining focus and relevant information active during processing, the latter by disengaging irrelevant information and offering better problem-solving skills. In this eye-tracking reading experiment, we investigated how adults ( N = 57) process verbal irony, based on their executive attention skills. The results indicated a null (or indirect) effect for WM, while fluid intelligence directly modulated the comprehension and processing of irony during reading. As fluid intelligence is an important individual-difference variable, the findings pave the way for future research on developmental and clinical populations who tend to struggle with nonliteral language.

Encountering idioms (hit the sack = “go to bed”) in a second language (L2) often results in a literal-first understanding (“literally hit a sack”). The figurative meaning is retrieved later, subject to idiom familiarity and L2 proficiency, and typically at a processing cost. Intriguingly recent findings report the overextension of idiom use in inappropriate contexts by advanced L2 users, with greater L2 proficiency somewhat mitigating this effect. In this study, we tested the tenability of this finding by comparing eye-movement patterns for idioms used literally, vs. literal control phrases (hit the dirt) in an eye-tracking-while-reading paradigm. We hypothesised that if idiom overextension holds, processing delays should be observed for idioms, as the (over)activated but contextually irrelevant figurative meanings would cause interference. In contrast, unambiguous control phrases should be faster to process. The results demonstrated undifferentiated processing for idioms used literally and control phrases across measures, with L2 proficiency affecting both similarly. Therefore, the findings do not support the hypothesis that advanced L2 users overextend idiom use in inappropriate contexts, nor that L2 proficiency modulates this tendency. The results are also discussed in light of potential pitfalls pertaining to idiom priming under typical experimental settings.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts many areas of a person's life. So far little is known on how ADHD affects the learning and usage of additional languages. The present study investigates what potential challenges and benefits adults with ADHD experience in second language (L2) learning, and what strategies they have developed to offset ADHD-related differences in cognition and behaviour. As part of a larger questionnaire, 59 participants with ADHD provided written responses, answering questions on how ADHD has influenced their learning and use of multiple languages. After a multiple-step classification process, three overarching topics were identified: (1) the effects of cognition on language learning and use; (2) how different language components and language modalities are affected by ADHD; and (3) what language learning strategies adults with ADHD apply. In our analysis, we present authentic quotes from individuals with ADHD and place them into the larger context of research on neurodivergence and L2 acquisition. Our results highlight the great heterogeneity in learning experiences and pathways in adults with ADHD. Interestingly, many respondents embrace their neurodiversity and develop individual strategies to enhance L2 proficiency. Our research aims to contribute to a better understanding of multilingualism within neurodiverse populations.

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is associated with pragmatic language impairments in children, but less is known about the communicative abilities of adults with ADHD, especially when using a second or third language. In this study, we developed a questionnaire to collect self-report measures of a set of pragmatic skills in a person's first, second and third language, comparing adults with and without an ADHD diagnosis. One hundred seventy-nine multilingual adults with (N = 91) and without ADHD (N = 88) completed the survey. As predicted, adults with ADHD reported more pragmatic difficulties than the control group. More specifically, people with ADHD showed pronounced impairments in regulating their behaviour in spoken interactions in the form of excessive talking, frequently interrupting others, and speaking without thinking first. Notably, these types of hyperactive and impulsive behaviours were significantly reduced when people with ADHD communicated in a second or third language. For pragmatic difficulties related to inattention such as concentrating on a conversation, both groups tended to be more inattentive in their third language compared to their first and second language. The understanding of non-literal language was only affected by ADHD in the first language and was generally more taxing in a language with lower proficiency levels. Our study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how ADHD affects different kinds of communicative abilities in multilingual adults. It also has implications for clinical practice, highlighting the importance of assessing symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity in a person's dominant language.

EDITORIAL article Front. Commun., 04 April 2023Sec. Language Sciences Volume 8 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1160727

Background:Weaknesses in executive function have persistently been found to be associated with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), while bilinguals have been argued to show advantages in executive functions. While there has been some research into how bilingualism affects cognitive skills and behaviour in individuals with attention deficits, the question is still very much open. The aim of this systematic review is to gather, synthesise and evaluate existing evidence on how bilingual language experience and attention deficits affect executive function performance and ADHD-related symptoms in children and adults. Methods:Following PRISMA guidelines, a comprehensive literature search in relevant databases (PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, ERIC, Web of Science, EMBASE, MEDLINE, LLBA) was performed using search strings related to attention difficulties/ADHD and bilingualism. All quantitative studies were included that presented original empirical data on the combined effects of bilingualism and attention levels, regardless of age group and methodology. The screening procedure revealed nine relevant studies. Results:Across the nine identified studies, a total of 2071 participants were tested. Of these, seven studies involved children and two adults. The studies varied considerably with respect to their design and methodology, the targeted executive function skills or behavioural symptoms, as well as their measure of bilingualism and attention levels. Most studies assessed aspects of executive function performance such as interference control, response inhibition, working memory or cognitive flexibility. Three studies looked at the effects of bilingualism on ADHD-related symptoms or ADHD diagnosis. Across the studies, no systematic advantage or disadvantage of bilingualism on cognitive performance or behaviour in people with attention deficits was observed. Conclusion:The limited number of identified studies provide no consistent evidence that bilingualism alleviates or intensifies attention difficulties in adults or children with ADHD. Based on the current state of research, individuals with ADHD and their families should not be concerned that learning additional languages has a negative impact on functioning or cognitive performance. Systematic review registration:https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PK768.

In order to understand most, if not any communicative act, the listener needs to make inferences about what the speaker intends to convey. This perspective-taking process is especially challenging in the case of nonliteral uses of language such as verbal irony (e.g., “Thanks for your help!” uttered to someone who has not provided the expected support). Children have been shown to have difficulties with the comprehension of irony well into the school years, but the factors that hamper or facilitate children’s perspective-taking in irony comprehension are not well understood. This study takes as its starting point the relevance-theoretic echoic analysis of verbal irony, and focuses on two of irony’s distinctive features as defined by this theory: (i) the normative bias and (ii) the characteristic tone of voice. In this study, we investigated the comprehension of irony in children aged 3–8. We manipulated these two factors, namely, the violation of different types of norms and the use of different tones of voice – to see how they affected children’s processing and interpretation of irony. Using an irony comprehension task that combined picture selection and eye-tracking, we found that the type of norm violation affected 4-to 5-year-olds’ offline understanding of irony, with a better performance on moral compared with social norm violations. Tone of voice had an effect on gaze behavior in adults, but not children, although a parodic, pretense-oriented tone of voice tended to lead to more looks to the angry compared with the happy emoticon at the offset of the ironical utterance, potentially facilitating children’s irony understanding. Our results show that the understanding of irony can be detected on explicit measures around age 6 – with the emergence of second-order perspective-taking abilities – but that a sensitivity to some of irony’s features can be detected several years earlier. Finally, our study provides a novel input to the debate on the existence of a so-called literal stage in pragmatic development, in particular regarding 3-year-olds’ differential performance on the offline and online measures of irony understanding, suggesting that they are not naively mistaking ironical utterances for “ordinary” literal ones.

In this paper we investigate children's processing and comprehension of metonymy, a type of figurative use of language where an object or individual is referred to via a salient property (e.g., The beard used to refer to a man with a big beard). We tested 126 children aged 3 to 8 years and an adult control group, using a novel methodology which combines an online (eye-tracking) and an offline (picture selection) measure. The results from the picture selection task replicate the findings of a U-shape reported in Falkum et al. (2017), with a better performance of 3-year-olds compared to 4- to-5-year-olds, who tend to prefer literal interpretations of target metonymic utterances. The gaze data, however, while also suggesting an early sensitivity to metonymy from the age of 3, show a continuous improvement of understanding with age. We discuss the results in the light of theoretical accounts of children's pragmatic development. We argue that eye-tracking is a 'purer' and cognitively less demanding measure of figurative language comprehension, which sheds new light on children's developing pragmatic competence. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

In both role play and reported speech, the actual speaker purports to present the speech of someone else. I analyse and compare the different perspectives that are involved in role play utterances and direct and indirect speech reports. I argue for a conceptual distinction between role play utterances and speech reports and discuss three criteria to distinguish them: (a) metalinguistic marking, (b) communicative intention, and (c) embodiment. Based on this analysis, I propose a hierarchy of identification with the other person, in which role play exhibits the highest degree of identification and indirect speech the lowest.