The findings from a number of recent studies indicate that, even in cases of successful bilingual first language acquisition, the possibility remains of a certain degree of crosslinguistic influence when the choice between syntactic options is affected by discourse pragmatics. In this study we focussed on the use of referring expressions, prime candidates to test the interaction between syntax and pragmatics, and we compared the distribution of subjects and objects in the Italian and English of a bilingual child (1;10–4;6) with that of two groups of MLUw-matched monolinguals. All arguments were coded for syntactic function and for a number of discourse pragmatic features predicted to affect their realisation. Our main prediction was that unidirectional crosslinguistic influence might occur for the English–Italian bilingual child with respect to pronominal subject and object use after the instantiation of the C system. Specifically we predicted that in Italian the bilingual child might use overt pronominal subjects in contexts where monolinguals would use a null subject, and that he might use postverbal strong object pronouns in Italian instead of preverbal weak pronominal clitics. Conversely, we did not expect the overall proportion of overt objects, whether noun phrases or pronouns, to vary crosslinguistically as objects are always obligatorily overt in both languages regardless of discourse pragmatics. Our results confirmed these predictions, and corroborated the argument that crosslinguistic influence may occur in bilingual first language acquisition in specific contexts in which syntax and pragmatics interact.

Guion, Clark, Harada and Wayland (2003) found that three factors affect English speakers' stress placement on bisyllabic non-words: syllabic structure, lexical class and stress patterns of phonologically similar real words. The current replication and extension included three groups (N = 30): native English speakers, early Spanish–English bilinguals, and late Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants produced and gave perceptual judgments on 40 non-words of varying syllabic structures in noun and verb sentence frames. A regression analysis used the three factors to predict stress placement in production and perception. All three groups showed significant effects from stress patterns of phonologically similar real words and lexical class. The effect of syllabic structure for early bilinguals was slightly different from that of native speakers and late bilinguals showed greatly reduced effects. Late bilinguals exhibited more initial stress overall, possibly due to L1 transfer. These results run counter to the prediction made by Long (1990) about age effects on phonological acquisition.

Simultaneous interpreting is a complex task where the interpreter is routinely involved in comprehending, translating and producing language at the same time. This study assessed two components that are likely to be major sources of complexity in SI: The simultaneity of comprehension and production, and transformation of the input. Furthermore, within the transformation component, we tried to separate reformulation from language-switching. We compared repeating sentences (shadowing), reformulating sentences in the same language (paraphrasing), and translating sentences (interpreting) of auditorily presented sentences, in a simultaneous and a delayed condition. Output performance and ear–voice span suggest that both the simultaneity of comprehension and production and the transformation component affect performance but that especially the combination of these components results in a marked drop in performance. General lower recall following a simultaneous condition than after a delayed condition suggests that articulation of speech may interfere with memory in SI.

Tests of inter-lingual homographs that have different meanings across two languages support models postulating initial non-selective access to competing language representations, e.g. Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model. Most such research assessed inter-lingual homographs in the absence of connected text. Here a letter detection paradigm was used that required subjects to detect letters in words in connected text. Prior work with this paradigm suggested that readers respond to only one interpretation of an intra-lingual homograph when detecting letters. Three experiments described here indicate that letter detection patterns to inter-lingual homographs are similar, i.e. detection reflects only a context appropriate interpretation. However, the demonstration that text role, text cohesiveness and bilingual fluency affect inter-lingual letter detection (Experiments 1 and 2), and that word role affects detection even though target frequency is constant across inter-lingual meanings (Experiment 3) indicates that selectivity is in response to post-lexical processes. Thus, results are seen as compatible with tenets of the BIA model.

We examined the effects of study-abroad experience (SAE) and working-memory capacity (WMC) on the types of errors made during single-word translation from the first language to the second language, contrasting non-response with meaning errors (i.e. when individuals translate semantically-related words instead of the target word). SAE and WMC interacted; individuals with more SAE and higher WMC made as many meaning as non-response errors, whereas individuals in the other groups made more non-response than meaning errors. We conclude that SAE encourages the use of approximate translations to communicate, but only higher WMC learners can do so because this strategy requires multiple items to be maintained in memory simultaneously. A speech-production model is adapted to capture our results and demonstrate the effects of differential working memory demands on producing correct translations, meaning errors, and non-response errors.