A prominent methodological issue in cognitive research on bilingualism is the lack of consistency in measuring second language (L2) proficiency. To reduce the inconsistency in L2 proficiency measurements, brief and valid vocabulary tests have been developed as an objective measure of proficiency in a variety of languages (e.g., English, French, Spanish). Here, we present LexCHI, a valid lexical test to measure Chinese proficiency. This freely available short test consists of 60 two-character items presented in simplified Chinese. Although it only takes a few minutes to complete LexCHI, the LexCHI scores in two studies correlated significantly with L2 participants' performance in a translation task and a cloze test. We believe that LexCHI is a useful tool for researchers who need to objectively measure Chinese proficiency as part of their investigations.
This paper evaluates a novel high variability phonetic training paradigm that involves presenting spoken words in adverse conditions. The effectiveness, generalizability, and longevity of this high variability phonetic training in adverse conditions was evaluated using English phoneme contrasts in three experiments with Malaysian multilinguals. Adverse conditions were created by presenting spoken words against background multi-talker babble. In Experiment 1, the adverse condition level was set at a fixed level throughout the training and in Experiment 2 the adverse condition level was determined for each participant before training using an adaptive staircase procedure. To explore the effectiveness and sustainability of the training, phonemic discrimination ability was assessed before and immediately after training (Experiments 1 and 2) and 6 months after training (Experiment 3). Generalization of training was evaluated within and across phonemic contrasts using trained and untrained stimuli. Results revealed significant perceptual improvements after just three 20-minute training sessions and these improvements were maintained after 6 months. The training benefits also generalized from trained to untrained stimuli. Crucially, perceptual improvements were significantly larger when the adverse conditions were adapted before each training session than when it was set at a fixed level. As the training improvements observed here are markedly larger than those reported in the literature, this indicates that the individualized phonetic training regime in adaptive adverse conditions (HVPT-AAC) is highly effective at improving speech perception.
Objective language proficiency measures have been found to provide better and more consistent estimates of bilinguals' language processing than self-rated proficiency (e.g., Tomoschuk et al., 2019; Wen & van Heuven, 2017a). However, objectively measuring language proficiency is often not possible because of a lack of quick and freely available language proficiency tests (Park et al., 2022). Therefore, quick valid vocabulary tests, such as LexTALE (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012) and its extensions (e.g., LexITA: Amenta et al., 2020; LEXTALE-FR: Brysbaert, 2013; LexPT: Zhou & Li, 2022) have been developed to reliably assess language proficiency of speakers of various languages. The present study introduces a Lexical Test for Malay Speakers (LexMAL), which estimates language proficiency for Malay first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. An initial 180-item LexMAL prototype was evaluated using 60 Malay L1 and 60 L2 speakers in Experiment 1. Sixty words and 30 nonwords with the highest discriminative power that span across the full difficulty range were selected for the final LexMAL based on point-biserial correlations and an item response theory analysis. The validity of LexMAL was demonstrated through a reliable discrimination between L1 and L2 speakers, significant correlations between LexMAL scores and performance on other Malay language tasks (i.e., translation accuracy and cloze test scores), and LexMAL outperforming self-rated proficiency. A validation study (Experiment 2) with the 90-item final LexMAL tested with a different group of Malay L1 (N = 61) and L2 speakers (N = 61) replicated the findings of Experiment 1. LexMAL is freely available for researchers at www.lexmal.org .
Translation equivalents are widely used in bilingual research concerning word processing (e.g., Eddington & Tokowicz, 2013; Jouravlev & Jared, 2020) and second-language vocabulary learning (e.g., Bracken et al., 2017; Degani et al., 2014). Although translation norms exist in several languages, to date there are no Malay-English translation norms. This study presents the first Malay-English translation norms collected with highly proficient Malay-English bilinguals. Furthermore, the study investigates the impact of lexical characteristics on translation ambiguity. The forward translation (FT) task (N = 30) collected English translations for 1004 Malay words selected from the Malay Lexicon Project (Yap et al., 2010), and subsequently the backward translation (BT) task (N = 30) gathered Malay translations for 845 English words obtained from the FT phase. The data revealed a high prevalence of translation ambiguity in both translation directions. Specifically, verbs, adjectives, and class-ambiguous words were more translation-ambiguous than nouns. Furthermore, within-language semantic variability and word length were positively correlated with translation ambiguity, whereas word frequency only correlated with translation ambiguity in FT. Word length and word frequency of the source words and their translations were positively correlated. Intriguingly, only in FT were bilinguals with higher Malay proficiency more likely to provide accurate and dominant translations for the Malay words. These findings contrast with those reported in translation norming studies involving other language pairs. The translation norms provide a useful resource for bilingual language studies involving Malay-English bilinguals.