The word frequency effect is stronger in second language (L2) processing than in first language (L1) processing. According to the lexical entrenchment hypothesis, this difference is not due to a qualitative difference in word processing between L1 and L2, but can be explained by differences in exposure to the target language: People with less exposure to a language show a steeper frequency curve for that language. Exposure differences can be measured with a vocabulary test. The present study tested whether the lexical entrenchment hypothesis provides an adequate explanation for differences in lexical decision times. To this end, we compared the performance of 56 Dutch–English bilinguals to that of 1011 English L1 speakers on 420 English six-letter words. In line with previous research, the differences in the word frequency effect between word processing in L1 and in L2 became vanishingly small once vocabulary size was entered as a predictor. Only in a diffusion model analysis did we find some evidence that the information build-up may be slower in L1 than in L2, independent of vocabulary size. We further report effects of cognates, age-of-acquisition, and neighborhood size that can also be explained in terms of differences in exposure.

While research on third language (L3) and multilingualism has recently shown remarkable growth, the fundamental question of what makes trilingualism special compared to bilingualism, and indeed monolingualism, continues to be evaded. In this contribution we consider whether there is such a thing as a true monolingual, and if there is a difference between dialects, styles, registers and languages. While linguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest differences in the processing of a third, compared to the first or second language, neurolinguistic research has shown that generally the same areas of the brain are activated during language use in proficient multilinguals. It is concluded that while from traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives there are grounds to differentiate monolingual, bilingual and multilingual processing, a more dynamic perspective on language processing in which development over time is the core issue, leads to a questioning of the notion of languages as separate entities in the brain.

Early bilingualism acquired from home or community is generally considered to positively influence cognitive development. The purpose of the present study was to determine to what extent bilingualism acquired through a second-language immersion education has a similar effect. Participants included a total of 106 French-speaking eight-year-old children drawn from two language groups: 53 children enrolled in English immersion classes since the age of five years (the immersion group) and 53 children enrolled in monolingual French-speaking classes (the monolingual group). The two groups were matched for verbal and nonverbal intelligence and socioeconomic status (SES). They were administered a battery of tasks assessing attentional and executive skills. The immersion group's reaction times were significantly faster than those of the monolingual group on tasks assessing alerting, auditory selective attention, divided attention and mental flexibility, but not interference inhibition. These results show that, after only three years, a second-language immersion school experience also produces some of the cognitive benefits associated with early bilingualism.

The present study investigates the syntactic competence of bilingual Portuguese–German returnees who have lost regular contact with their L2 (German). The main criterion which distinguishes the participants is the age of input loss. This allows their division into two main groups: speakers who lost German input during early childhood (between ages seven and ten) and speakers who were eleven or older when they moved away from the German environment. Focusing on verb placement in main and embedded clauses, the available data show strong evidence of the existence of a stabilization phase following the acquisition period. The speakers who lost L2 input earlier than age eleven show significantly more syntactic deficits than the other speakers. However, the observed attrition effects seem to be the result of insufficient L2 activation, rather than the expression of undergoing competence loss.

Previous studies have indicated that bilingualism may facilitate lexical learning in adults. The goals of this research were (i) to examine whether bilingual influences on word learning diverge for phonologically-familiar and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, and (ii) to examine whether increased phonological memory capacity can account for bilingual effects on word learning. In Experiment 1, participants learned phonologically-familiar novel words that were constructed using the phonemes of English – the native language for all participants. In Experiment 2, participants learned phonologically-unfamiliar novel words that included non-English phonemes. In each experiment, bilingual adults were contrasted with two groups of monolingual adults: a high memory-span monolingual group (that matched bilinguals on phonological memory performance) and a low-span monolingual group. Results showed that bilingual participants in both experiments outperformed monolingual participants, both high-span and low-span. High-span monolinguals outperformed low-span monolinguals when learning phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, but not when learning phonologically-familiar novel words. The findings suggest that the bilingual advantage for novel word learning is not contingent on the phonological properties of novel words, and that phonological memory capacity as measured here cannot account for the bilingual effects on learning.

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.

Monolingual listeners continuously predict upcoming information. Here, we tested whether predictive language processing occurs to the same extent when bilinguals listen to their native language vs. a non-native language. Additionally, we tested whether bilinguals use prediction to the same extent as monolinguals. Dutch–English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened to constraining and neutral sentences in Dutch (bilinguals only) and in English, and viewed target and distractor pictures on a display while their eye movements were measured. There was a bias of fixations towards the target object in the constraining condition, relative to the neutral condition, before information from the target word could affect fixations. This prediction effect occurred to the same extent in native processing by bilinguals and monolinguals, but also in non-native processing. This indicates that unbalanced, proficient bilinguals can quickly use semantic information during listening to predict upcoming referents to the same extent in both of their languages.

In the present article we provide evidence for the occurrence of transfer of conceptualization patterns in narratives of two German–Turkish bilingual groups. All bilingual participants grew up in Germany, but only one group is still resident in Germany (n = 49). The other, the returnees, moved back to Turkey after having lived in Germany for thirteen years (n = 35). The study is based on the theoretical framework for conceptual transfer outlined in Jarvis and Pavlenko (2008) and on the typology of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages developed by Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000a, b) and Slobin (1987, 1996, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006). In the present study we provide evidence for the hypothesis that language structure affects the organization of information structure at the level of the Conceptualizer, and show that bilingual speakers’ conceptualization of motion events is influenced by the dominant linguistic environment in both languages (German for the group in Germany and Turkish for the returnees). The returnees follow the Turkish blueprints for the conceptualization of motion, in both Turkish and German event construals, whereas the German-resident bilinguals follow the German blueprints, when speaking German as well as Turkish. We argue that most of the patterns found are the result of transfer of conceptualization patterns from the dominant language of the environment.

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998; Zagona, 2002); i.e., personal a is conditioned by the interpretability of semantic features. Forty-nine English L2 learners of Spanish of three different proficiency levels, and 16 Spanish controls took part in a Completion Task and an Acceptability Judgement Task. These revealed that L2 learners of Spanish of all proficiency levels behaved differently from native speakers of Spanish. The L2 learners appear to have acquired some of the interpretable features (i.e., [±animate]), but show delays with others. Nonetheless, our data show partial convergence by advanced learners with the native speakers: some features are acquirable, while others may be less accessible and subject to developmental processes. In explaining our data we appeal to Lardiere's (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, but assess it critically and aim to develop it further by considering the complexity constraints in terms of the number of features involved and their configuration.

The competitive nature of the lexical selection process during spoken word production is well established in monolinguals. In this paper we explore the implication of this process for spoken word production in bilinguals. A cross-language semantic competitor priming effect was demonstrated, which shows that cross-language lexical competition is a feature of the word production system of the unbalanced English–French bilinguals who participated in the experiment. Experimental evidence was also found which suggests that a selected language bias effected through inhibition of the unwanted language plays an important role in resolving the cross-language lexical competition during bilingual word production in a selected language. The data further suggest that the dominance of the unwanted language relative to the selected language determines the presence/absence or “strength” of inhibition through which the selected language bias is effected. These findings are also interpreted in terms of a recent language-specific lexical selection account of bilingual lexical access.

Simultaneous interpreting (SI) is a complex skill, where language comprehension and production take place at the same time in two different languages. In this study we identified some of the basic cognitive skills involved in SI, focusing on the roles of memory and lexical retrieval. We administered a reading span task in two languages and a verbal digit span task in the native language to assess memory capacity, and a picture naming and a word translation task to tap the retrieval time of lexical items in two languages, and we related performance on these four tasks to interpreting skill in untrained bilinguals. The results showed that word translation and picture naming latencies correlate with interpreting performance. Also digit span and reading span were associated with SI performance, only less strongly so. A graphical models analysis indicated that specifically word translation efficiency and working memory form independent subskills of SI performance in untrained bilinguals.

A large body of research into bilingualism has revealed that language processing is fundamentally non-selective; there is simultaneous, graded co-activation of mental representations from both of the speakers’ languages. An equally deep tradition of research into code switching/mixing has revealed the important role that grammatical principles play in determining the nature of bilingual speech. We propose to integrate these two traditions within the formalism of Gradient Symbolic Computation. This allows us to formalize the integration of grammatical principles with gradient mental representations. We apply this framework to code mixing constructions where an element of an intended utterance appears in both languages within a single utterance and discuss the directions it suggests for future research.

Speakers who routinely use more than one language may not use any of their languages in ways which are exactly like that of a monolingual speaker. In sequential bilingualism, for example, there is often evidence of interference from the L1 in the L2 system. Describing these interference phenomena and accounting for them on the basis of theoretical models of linguistic knowledge has long been a focus of interest of Applied Linguistics. More recently, research has started to investigate linguistic traffic which goes the other way: L2 interferences and contact phenomena evident in the L1. Such phenomena are probably experienced to some extent by all bilinguals. They are, however, most evident among speakers for whom a language other than the L1 has started to play an important, if not dominant, role in everyday life (Schmid and Köpke, 2007). This is the case for migrants who move to a country where a language is spoken which, for them, is a second or foreign language. We refer to the phenomena of L1 change and L2 interference which can be observed in such situations as language attrition.

Research investigating the relationship between language and cognition (Lucy, 1992b) shows that speakers of languages with grammatical number marking (e.g. English) judge differences in the number of countable objects as more significant than differences in the number or amount of non-countable substances. On the other hand, speakers of languages which lack grammatical number marking (e.g. Yucatec) show no such preference. The current paper extends Lucy's (1992b) investigation, comparing monolingual English and Japanese speakers with Japanese speakers of English as a second language (L2). Like Yucatec, Japanese is a non-plural-marking language. Results show that intermediate L2 speakers behave similarly to the Japanese monolinguals while advanced L2 speakers behave similarly to the English monolinguals. The results (a) provide support for the claim that grammatical representation may influence cognition in specific ways and (b) suggest that L2 acquisition may alter cognitive dispositions established by a first language (L1).

This study examines the convergence and divergence between subjective and objective measures of language proficiency for assessing language dominance in Mandarin–English bilinguals. Sixty-two young adults (Experiment 1) and 27 children (Experiment 2) provided self-ratings of proficiency level (or were rated by their parents), were interviewed for spoken proficiency, and named pictures in the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and (in Experiment 1 only) the Boston Naming Test. In Experiment 1, the four measures converged in the number of people classified into different dominance groups but both naming tests indicated greater English dominance than self-report and interview measures. In Experiment 2, parent report and interview measures converged in dominance classifications but the MINT indicated higher degrees of English dominance. To a large extent bilinguals were able to classify themselves (or their children) into dominance groups but some mismatches between measures in dominance classification were observed for all age and dominance groups. These results, together with previous findings with Spanish–English bilingual adults (Gollan et al., 2012), suggest that bilinguals may shift to English dominance in confrontation naming before they do so in conversational fluency, and that dominance shifts persist throughout the lifespan but may be relatively more pronounced in children. These findings caution against the use of self-reports as the sole means of classifying bilinguals into dominance groups and support a multi-measure approach including direct assessment of the relevant linguistic domain.

The present study investigated the impact of bilingualism on efficiency of alerting, orienting and executive attention by means of the Lateralized Attention Network Test (LANT). Young adult bilinguals who had been exposed to their second language before the age of four years showed a reduced conflict cost and a larger alerting effect in terms of response time (RT), while no difference between bilinguals and monolinguals was observed in overall RT. Bilinguals also outperformed monolinguals on accuracy in both conflict and non-conflict trials, though the effect in the latter condition was very small. Moreover, while a left visual field advantage for accuracy of conflict resolution was present in the monolingual group, bilinguals did not show the asymmetry. The findings suggest that bilingualism enhances the efficiency of executive network while reducing its lateralization. The larger alerting effect in bilinguals is hypothesized to be related to bilinguals’ more efficient executive control, which may support processes of response anticipation or temporal orienting.

In this paper, I present an exploratory study on cross-linguistic interference among Quechua-Spanish bilingual children living in a language contact situation. The study focuses on convergence in the tense, aspectual and evidentiality systems of the two languages. While in Quechua past tense features are strongly linked to evidentiality in the matrix of features associated with the functional category Tense, in Spanish, past tense features are linked to aspectual features. The study presents evidence that supports the Functional Convergence Hypothesis according to which syntactic convergence among bilingual speakers is favored when the matrix of features associated with a functional category is partially divergent, as is the case for Tense in Spanish and Quechua. The Spanish results indicate that among bilinguals past tense is associated with evidentiality features and contrast sharply with the results of the monolingual comparison group. Bilingual Quechua results exhibit an incipient emergence of discourse-oriented background and foreground distinctions, similar to those found in Spanish in association with aspectual morphology.

In two experiments, we tested the role of lexical repetition, cognates, and second language (L2) proficiency in the priming of code-switches, using the structural priming technique. Dutch–English bilinguals repeated a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then described a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). Low- and high-proficient speakers of L2 English were tested in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively. We found that the participants’ tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was influenced by lexical repetition between prime sentence and target picture and by the presence of a cognate in prime and target. A combined analysis showed that these lexical effects were stronger in the high-proficient than in the low-proficient L2 speakers. These results provide new insights into how language-related and speaker-related variables influence code-switching in sentences, and extend cognitive models of lexical and combinatorial processes in bilingual sentence production.

Though many previous studies have reported enhanced cognitive control in bilinguals, few have investigated if such control is modulated by language proficiency. Here, we examined the inhibitory control of high and low proficient Hindi–English bilinguals on an oculomotor Stroop task. Subjects were asked to make a saccade as fast as possible towards the appropriate colour patch among competitors and distractors suppressing an eye movement evoked by the meaning of the word. High proficient bilinguals quickly oriented their attention towards the correct colour patch while effectively controlling the Stroop interference compared with low proficient subjects, on both colour and direction words. High proficient bilinguals also had fewer saccadic errors and demonstrated overall faster saccadic latency on all trial types. The results provide strong evidence for enhanced oculomotor control in proficient bilinguals compared with the less proficient ones.

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation, due in part to the robust case-marking system in German – a morphosyntactic feature that is largely absent in English (e.g., Juffs and Harrington, 1995; Fanselow, Kliegl and Schlesewsky 1999; Meng and Bader, 2000; Juffs, 2005). The results revealed that the L2 German speakers utilized case-marking information and exhibited a subject-preference similar to German native speakers. These findings are discussed in light of relevant research regarding the ability of L2 speakers to adopt native-like processing strategies in their L2.