Listeners efficiently exploit sentence prosody to direct attention to words bearing sentence accent. This effect has been explained as a search for focus, furthering rapid apprehension of semantic structure. A first experiment supported this explanation: English listeners detected phoneme targets in sentences more rapidly when the target-bearing words were in accented position or in focussed position, but the two effects interacted, consistent with the claim that the effects serve a common cause. In a second experiment a similar asymmetry was observed with Dutch listeners and Dutch sentences. In a third and a fourth experiment, proficient Dutch users of English heard English sentences; here, however, the two effects did not interact. The results suggest that less efficient mapping of prosody to semantics may be one way in which nonnative listening fails to equal native listening.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language (within-language competition), the other language (between-language competition), or both languages at the same time (simultaneous competition) was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition in which no objects overlapped phonologically with the target. Results support previous findings of parallel activation of lexical items within and between languages, but suggest that the magnitude of the between-language competition effect may vary across first and second languages and may be mediated by a number of factors such as stimuli, language background, and language mode.

We explored the role of age of acquisition in picture naming with a group of unbalanced, late bilinguals and a group of monolinguals. We hypothesised that we would find effects of L2 age of acquisition on L2 picture naming performance in late bilinguals if the age of acquisition effects we and others have found in L1 picture naming are not limited to language capabilities acquired early in the lifespan. In Experiment 1, late bilingual Spanish–English participants named a large set of pictures in their L2 (English). The most important predictor of naming ability was L2 age of acquisition. In Experiment 2, monolingual English participants named the same pictures. Naming speed was predicted by L1 age of acquisition. Hence speed of picture naming in a given language was predicted by age of acquisition values for that language, that is, L2 values predicted L2 performance (Experiment 1) and L1 values predicted L1 performance (Experiment 2). On the basis of these results we conclude that age of acquisition effects are not restricted to items learned before any putative critical period, but should be observed for items learned at any age. That is, age of acquisition effects are more likely to be due to the relative order in which items are acquired within a language.

This paper provides a case study of the fossilized endstate L2 English grammar of an adult native speaker of Turkish. Results are presented from production data (over 3400 utterances, gathered over 2 time periods 18 months apart), concentrating on verbal and nominal inflection and associated syntactic properties; data from a number of other tasks are also presented. A high level of accuracy in suppliance of English tense and agreement morphology was found. In contrast, suppliance of definite and indefinite articles was significantly lower but nevertheless appropriate. Syntactic correlates (such as verb placement, presence of overt subjects, case assignment, definiteness effects) were all completely accurate, suggesting no underlying impairment to functional categories or features. There is some evidence for influence from the L1, which has rich inflection but lacks articles, but this appears to be an effect on suppliance of overt morphology and not on underlying representation, which shows properties appropriate to the L2.

This paper considers whether the findings on the referential properties of Root Infinitives in monolingual children (Wijnen, 1997; Hoekstra and Hyams, 1998) are replicated in a bilingual situation. Testing a proposal put forward by Hulk and Müller (2000), the present study investigates whether and how crosslinguistic influence manifests itself, using original longitudinal data from a bilingual German/English child. The bilingual results are found to be broadly consistent with the monolingual data: there is no indication of either quantitative or qualitative crosslinguistic influence. Consequently, it is argued that these data show that Hulk and Müller's proposal needs refining. Suggestions are made as to how this could be achieved.

The Rodriguez-Fornells, Rotte, Heinze, Nösselt and Münte (2002) paper published in Nature, “Brain potential and functional MRI evidence for how to handle two languages with one brain”, is discussed by two of its authors, both neuroscientists, and by two language scientists. First, a short summary of the paper is given. This is followed by a critical commentary offered by the language scientists. The neuroscientists respond, and a final comment is offered by the language scientists. The four authors conclude that a two-way collaboration between neurosciences and language sciences should be encouraged in order to make headway in our understanding of language processing and representation in bilinguals.