The investigation of bilingualism and cognition has been enriched by recent developments in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Extending how bilingual experience shapes cognition, this review examines recent fMRI studies adopting executive control tasks with minimal or no linguistic demands. Across a range of studies with divergent ages and language pairs spoken by bilinguals, brain regions supporting executive control significantly overlap with brain regions recruited for language control (Abutalebi & Green). Furthermore, limited but emerging studies on resting-state networks are addressed, which suggest more coherent spatially distributed functional connectivity in bilinguals. Given the dynamic nature of bilingual experience, it is essential to consider both task-related functional networks (externally-driven engagement), and resting-state networks, such as default mode network (internal control). Both types of networks are important elements of bilingual language control, which relies on domain-general executive control.

Typological differences in expressions of motion are argued to have consequences for event conceptualization. In SLA, studies generally find transfer of L1 expressions and accompanying event construals, suggesting resistance to the restructuring of event conceptualization. The current study tackles such restructuring in SLA within the context of bidirectional cross-linguistic influence, focusing on expressions of Path in English and Japanese. We probe the effects of lexicalization patterns on event construal by focusing on different Path components: Source, Via and Goal. Crucially, we compare the same speakers performing both in the L1 and L2 to ascertain whether the languages influence each other. We argue for the potential for restructuring, even at modest levels of L2 proficiency, by showing that not only do L1 patterns shape construal in the L2, but that L2 patterns may subtly and simultaneously broaden construal in the L1 within an individual learner.

Numerous studies have argued that bilingualism has effects on cognitive functions. Recently, in light of increasingly mixed empirical results, this claim has been challenged. One might ponder if there is enough evidence to justify a cessation to future research on the topic or, alternatively, how the field could proceed to better understand the phantom-like appearance of bilingual effects. Herein, we attempt to frame this appearance at the crossroads of several factors such as the heterogeneity of the term ‘bilingual’, sample size effects, task effects, and the complex dynamics between an early publication bias that favours positive results and the subsequent Proteus phenomenon. We conclude that any definitive claim on the topic is premature and that research must continue, albeit in a modified way. To this effect, we offer a path forward for future multi-lab work that should provide clearer answers to whether bilingualism has neurocognitive effects, and if so, under what conditions.

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.

Spanish–English bilingual lexical organization was investigated using masked cognate and non-cognate priming with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, three groups of bilinguals (Spanish dominant, English dominant and Balanced) and a single group of beginning bilinguals (Spanish) were tested with Spanish and English targets primed by cognate and non-cognate translations. All the bilingual groups showed cognate but not non-cognate priming. This cognate priming effect was similar in magnitude to the within-language repetition priming effect; it did not vary across participants who had different second-language acquisition histories, nor was the size of the priming effect modulated by the direction of the translation. The beginning bilingual group only showed cognate priming when the primes were in Spanish (L1) and the targets in English (L2). In Experiment 2, both form-related and unrelated word baselines were used with a single group of bilinguals. The results were the same as Experiment 1: cognate priming and no non-cognate priming. Experiment 3 examined the cognate priming effect with reduced orthographic and phonological overlap. Despite this reduced form overlap, it was found that the cognate effect was the same size as the within-language repetition effect. These results indicate that cognate translations are special and ways of modifying models of bilingual lexical processing to reflect this were considered.

This study investigated whether bilinguals simultaneously activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading words in just one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homographs (e.g., PAIN) that were low in frequency in the target language of the study (English) and high in frequency in the nontarget language (French). Both English-French and French-English bilinguals were tested. In each experiment, participants named a block of English experimental words, a block of French filler words, and then a second block of English experimental words. In the first block of English trials, the English-French bilinguals had similar naming latencies for homographs and English-only control words, although they made more errors on homographs. In contrast, the French-English bilinguals showed a homograph disadvantage in both the latency and error data. In the second block of English trials, both the English-French bilinguals and the French-English bilinguals showed homograph interference on latency and error measures. We interpret these results as indicating that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific, depending on the characteristics of the bilingual and whether they have recently named words in the nontarget language.

Anecdotal reports provide evidence of so called “hybrid” gesturer whose non-verbal behavior of one language/culture becomes visible in the other. The direction of this gestural transfer seems to occur from a high to a low frequency gesture language. The purpose of this study was therefore to test systematically 1) whether gestural transfer occurs from a high frequency gesture language to a low frequency gesture language, 2) if the frequency of production of some gesture types is more likely to be transferred than others, and 3) whether gestural transfer can also occur bi-directionally. To address these questions, we investigated the use of gestures of English–Spanish bilinguals, French–English bilinguals, and English monolinguals while retelling a cartoon. Our analysis focused on the rate of gestures and the frequency of production of gesture types. There was a significant difference in the overall rate of gestures: both bilingual groups gestured more than monolingual participants. This difference was particularly salient for iconic gestures. In addition, we found that French–English bilinguals used more deictic gestures in their L2. The results suggest that knowledge of a high frequency gesture language affects the gesture rate in a low-frequency gesture language.

Many bilinguals routinely switch between their languages, yet mixed evidence exists about the transfer of language switching skills to broader domains that require attentional control such as task switching. Monolingual and bilingual young adults performed a nonverbal task-switching paradigm in which they viewed colored pictures of animals and indicated either the animal or its color in response to a cue. Monolinguals and bilinguals performed similarly when switching between tasks (local switch cost) in a mixed-task block, but bilinguals demonstrated a smaller mixing effect (global switch cost) than monolinguals, indicating better ability to reconfigure stimulus–response associations. These results suggest that regular practice using multiple languages confers a broader executive function advantage shown as improved flexibility in task switching.

Code-switching among proficient adult bilinguals has been extensively studied, and it is by now universally concluded that intra-sentential code alternations are rule-governed and systematic, displaying dependency relations that reflect the operation of underlying syntactic principles. The central, guiding question to be addressed herein is whether and, if so, how second language learners acquire the knowledge that defines structural coherence and allows them to render well-formedness judgments for code-switched forms. This exploration takes on particular significance given that learners receive no evidence which could guide them in rendering such judgments, and therefore results consistent with those observed among competent bilinguals could be imputed to unconscious, abstract linguistic knowledge. The investigation thus proves doubly fruitful, in the discovery of developmental patterns and in the evaluation of linguistic-theoretical methodologies and constructs.

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals (all near-native speakers of Swedish). Spanish and Swedish differ as regards grammatical aspect: whereas Swedish lacks this grammatical category, Spanish conveys aspect through verbal morphology and periphrasis. The principal aim of the study was to explore the relationship between productive event conceptualization patterns and receptive decoding proficiency related to aspectual contrasts. The participants were asked to provide oral L1 Spanish descriptions of video clips projecting motion events with different degrees of endpoint orientation (see von Stutterheim, 2003). In addition, they took a grammaticality judgment test concerning verb and gender agreement, verbal clitics and aspectual contrasts. Compared with baseline data from monolingual Spanish speakers, the results on endpoint encoding show that the bilinguals mention the endpoints of motion events to a higher degree than the Spanish control group does. Moreover, it was shown that the weaker the bilinguals' discrimination of aspectual errors on the grammaticality judgment test, the more prone they were to encoding endpoints. This result consequently furthers the hypothesis about the interconnectedness between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization. The results were further interpreted as indicating that the bilinguals are influenced by the Swedish-like tendency to attend to the boundedness rather than the ongoingness of events.

Research on processing in English has shown that verb information facilitates predictive processing. Because Japanese verbs occur at the ends of clauses, this information cannot be used to predict the roles of preceding nominals. Kamide, Altmann and Haywood (2003) showed that native Japanese speakers use case markers to predict forthcoming linguistic items. In the present study, we investigated whether second language learners of Japanese demonstrate such predictive effects when processing sentences containing either the monotransitive or ditransitive constructions. A visual-world paradigm experiment showed that, although native speakers generated predictions for syntactic outcomes, the learners did not. These findings underscore the usefulness of morphosyntactic information in processing Japanese and indicate that learners fail to make full use of case markers to generate expectations regarding syntactic outcomes during online processing. Learners may rely on nonlinguistic information to compensate for this deficit in syntactic processing.

We report the results from two experiments investigating proficient Japanese-speaking learners' processing of reflexive object pronouns in English as a second language (L2). Experiment 1 used a timed grammaticality judgement task to assess learners' sensitivity to binding Principle A under processing pressure, and Experiment 2 investigated the time-course of reflexive anaphor resolution during L2 reading using the eye-movement monitoring technique. Taken together, our results show that despite having demonstrated native-like knowledge of reflexive binding in corresponding untimed tasks, the learners processed English reflexives differently from native speakers in that they took into consideration a matching discourse-prominent but binding-theoretically inappropriate antecedent when first encountering a reflexive. This suggests that unlike what has been reported in corresponding monolingual processing research (Sturt, 2003), initial antecedent search in L2 English is not constrained by binding Principle A.

In this study we explore the role of explicit metalinguistic knowledge (MLK) of first language (L1) in the learning of a third language (L3). We compare the oral production of 40 participants with varying degrees of explicit MLK of the L1, who are exposed to a completely new L3. In accordance with the second language (L2) status factor, which is further motivated by the distinction between implicit competence and explicit knowledge (Bardel & Falk, 2012; Paradis, 2009), we hypothesize that the participants with low explicit MLK in their L1 will transfer from their L2, and that the participants with high explicit MLK in the L1 will transfer from their L1. The structure of interest is adjective placement, which is the same in the L1 and the L3 (but not in the participants’ L2s). The results show that the degree of explicit MLK in the L1 plays a decisive role at the initial state of L3 learning.

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, asking how a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself in long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type–token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spoken data, including factors such as lexical frequency and distributional measures. The study is based on controlled, elicited and free data from two populations of attriters of L1 German (L2 Dutch and English) and a control population (n = 53 in each group). Group comparisons and a Discriminant Analysis show that lexical diversity, sophistication and the distribution of items across the text in free speech are better predictors of group membership than formal tasks or elicited narratives. Extralinguistic factors, such as frequency of exposure and use or length of residence, have no predictive power for our results.

Idiom priming effects (faster processing compared to novel phrases) are generally robust in native speakers but not non-native speakers. This leads to the question of how idioms and other multiword units are represented and accessed in a first (L1) and second language (L2). We address this by investigating the processing of translated Chinese idioms to determine whether known L1 combinations show idiom priming effects in non-native speakers when encountered in the L2. In two eye-tracking experiments we compared reading times for idioms vs. control phrases (Experiment 1) and for figurative vs. literal uses of idioms (Experiment 2). Native speakers of Chinese showed recognition of the L1 form in the L2, but figurative meanings were read more slowly than literal meanings, suggesting that the non-compositional nature of idioms makes them problematic in a non-native language. We discuss the results as they relate to crosslinguistic priming at the multiword level.

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English–Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed in the choice of a subject antecedent for null anaphoric pronouns, and only marginally significant differences were reported between the adults and the two groups of children for the interpretation of null cataphoric pronouns. By contrast, overt pronominal subjects were accepted as co-referential with a subject antecedent significantly more often by the bilingual children than by the monolingual children and the adults in the anaphoric condition, and both groups of children accepted a subject as the antecedent of an overt cataphoric pronoun significantly more often than the adults. These results are interpreted in the context of language-universal and language-specific processing strategies in anaphora resolution in bilingual and monolingual acquisition.

This study investigated two prominent issues in the comprehension of language switches. First, how does language switching direction affect switch costs in sentence context? Second, are switch costs modulated by L2 proficiency and cross-linguistic activation? We conducted a self-paced reading task involving sentences that switched between participants’ L1 Dutch and L2 English. The cognate status of the main verb was manipulated to examine the influence of co-activation on intra-sentential switch costs. The reading times indicated the influence of switch direction: a cost was observed for switches into L2 but not for switches into L1, and the magnitude of the costs was correlated with L2 proficiency, indicating that switch costs in language comprehension depend on language dominance. Verb cognates did not yield a cognate facilitation effect nor did they influence the magnitude of switch costs in either direction. The results are interpreted in terms of an activation account explaining lexical comprehension based on L2 proficiency.

Previous studies demonstrate that lexical coding of colour influences categorical perception of colour, such that participants are more likely to rate two colours to be more similar if they belong to the same linguistic category (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005). Recent work shows changes in Greek–English bilinguals' perception of within and cross-category stimulus pairs as a function of the availability of the relevant colour terms in semantic memory, and the amount of time spent in the L2-speaking country (Athanasopoulos, 2009). The present paper extends Athanasopoulos' (2009) investigation by looking at cognitive processing of colour in Japanese–English bilinguals. Like Greek, Japanese contrasts with English in that it has an additional monolexemic term for ‘light blue’ (mizuiro). The aim of the paper is to examine to what degree linguistic and extralinguistic variables modulate Japanese–English bilinguals' sensitivity to the blue/light blue distinction. Results showed that those bilinguals who used English more frequently distinguished blue and light blue stimulus pairs less well than those who used Japanese more frequently. These results suggest that bilingual cognition may be dynamic and flexible, as the degree to which it resembles that of either monolingual norm is, in this case, fundamentally a matter of frequency of language use.

We used a visual lexical decision task to explore control processes in proficient German–English bilinguals. Participants pressed a “yes” button if the letter string was a word in English and a “no” button if it was not. Our critical stimuli were interlingual homographs such as the low-frequency English word TAG. In German, TAG means “day” and is a relatively high frequency word. Overall, our participants responded more slowly to an interlingual homograph than to a control word matched to its English frequency. As we expected, the size of this interference effect depended on various factors. First, including “pure” German words in the stimulus list increased interference. However, participants were able to reduce the degree of interference over time even in the presence of such words. Second, in the absence of pure German words, informing participants about the presence of interlingual homographs from the start of the experimental trials allowed them to reduce interference. We examined the locus of these control effects by analysing carry-over, i.e., reaction times on word trials immediately following an interlingual homograph or its matched control. We inferred from the patterns of interference and carry-over that the primary locus for reducing interference is external to the bilingual lexico-semantic system. We consider the implications of these data for theories of control.

The present study aimed (a) to determine whether the bilingual advantage in false-belief (FB) understanding is replicated when considering socio-economic status and (b) to assess whether conflict inhibition and/or working memory underpin the advantage, if there is one. Monolingual preschoolers (24 English monolinguals and 24 French monolinguals) and 24 English–French bilingual counterparts received FB, conflict inhibition, working memory, and verbal ability tests. Monolingual and bilingual groups were equivalent on parental income and education, measured through a parental questionnaire. Results indicated that bilinguals significantly outperformed monolinguals on FB, but only after statistically controlling for language proficiency and age. Working memory likely compensated for the potential negative impact of bilinguals’ low language proficiency on FB.