An error was made in the preparation of Figure 3 in the article by Kootstra et al., published online on January 4, 2012. The figure should not have presented odds ratios, but odds. The correct version of Figure 3 is given below. This new figure leads to the same interpretation as in the original article, so our conclusions remain the same.

The present study investigated orthographic and phonological processing in L2 French spoken word recognition by Finnish learners of French, using the masked cross-modal priming paradigm. Experiment 1 showed a repetition effect in L2 within-language priming that was most pronounced for high proficiency learners and a significant effect for French pseudohomophones. In the between-language Experiment 2, high proficiency learners showed significant facilitation from L1 Finnish to L2 French shared orthography in the absence of phonological and semantic overlap. This effect was not observed in the lower intermediate group, which showed a significant benefit of L1 pseudohomophones instead. The orthographic effect in the high proficiency group was modulated by subjective familiarity showing facilitation for less familiar but not for highly familiar words. The results suggest that with L2 learners, the extent to which orthographic information affects L2 spoken word recognition depends on their L2 proficiency.

Babcok et al. (2012) claim that Paradis (1994, 2004, 2009) argues that the reliance of late L2 learners on L1 neurocognitive mechanisms increases over time across both lexical and grammatical functions, namely for lexical items as well as rule-governed grammatical procedures, when in fact one can find repeated statements to the contrary in the very publications cited by the authors. Actually, Paradis’ main contention over the past 20 years has been that, contrary to grammatical functions, lexical items (as meaning–form relationships) are always of the same nature in L1 and L2 (hence stored declaratively). Thus in L2, only the neurocognitive mechanisms on which aspects of the grammar depend change over time. Consequently, the finding that length of residence (like age of arrival) influences the mechanisms underlying regular (composed), but not irregular (stored) verb forms, is compatible with Paradis’ views, in contradiction to what Babcock et al. are also suggesting.

The relation between language proficiency and executive functions has been established for monolingual children. The present study addresses this issue in bilingual children, comparing the language proficiency of sequential English–Hebrew bilingual preschool children as determined by standardized assessment instruments and generic executive control in inhibition, sorting and shifting tasks. Participants were recruited from regular and language preschools and classified according to their language proficiency as bilinguals with high language proficiency in at least one of their languages (including balanced bilinguals with high language proficiency in both languages, L2-dominant, and L1-dominant) and bilinguals showing low language proficiency in both languages. As reported for monolingual preschool children, positive relationships between language proficiency and inhibition and shifting abilities were found, with significantly lower performance among low language proficiency bilinguals. Significantly better performance was also found for shifting among children who had already mastered their L2 compared to those who were still in the process of acquiring the new language.

Solving insight problems is a complex task found to involve coarse semantic processing in the right hemisphere when tested in English. In Hebrew, the left hemisphere (LH) may be more active in this task, due to the inter-hemispheric interaction between semantic, phonological and orthographic processing. In two Hebrew insight problems experiments, we revealed a performance advantage in the LH, in contrast to the patterns previously observed in English. A third experiment, conducted in English with early Hebrew–English bilinguals, confirmed that the LH advantage found with Hebrew speakers does not depend on specific task requirements in Hebrew. We suggest that Hebrew speakers show redundancy between the hemispheres in coarse semantic processing in handling frequent lexical ambiguities stemming from the orthographic structure in Hebrew. We further suggest that inter-hemispheric interactions between linguistic and non-linguistic processes may determine the hemisphere in which coarse coding will take place. These findings highlight the possible effect of exposure to a specific mother tongue on the lateralization of processes in the brain, and carries possible theoretical and methodological implications for cross-language studies.

This study examined cross-linguistic transfer in oral language skills in a sample of 50 native Hebrew speakers who learned English as a second language. The ability to retrieve phonological forms of words in naming, as manifested by the tendency to experience tip-of-the-tongue states, was correlated across languages. We also found within and across language correlations between this ability and grammatical accuracy, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in second language narratives. These findings are consistent with the transfer across languages in oral language skills and provide insights into the processes linking phonological and higher level encoding in production of connected speech.

This study presents results from a cross-modal priming experiment investigating inflected verb forms of German. A group of late learners of German with Russian as their native language (L1) was compared to a control group of German L1 speakers. The experiment showed different priming patterns for the two participant groups. The L1 German data yielded a stem-priming effect for inflected forms involving regular affixation and a partial priming effect for irregular forms irrespective of stem allomorphy. By contrast, the data from the late bilinguals showed reduced priming effects for both regular and irregular forms. We argue that late learners rely more on lexically stored inflected word forms during word recognition and less on morphological parsing than native speakers.

Researchers have speculated that gesture use may be linked to working memory capacity. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the architectures of working memory differ among monolinguals and bilinguals, and to investigate whether individual differences in working memory predict gesture use. Participants relayed a narrative and their gesture production was assessed. Working memory capacity was tested using the Automated Working Memory Assessment (Alloway, 2007). The results provide evidence for different working memory architectures among monolinguals and bilinguals. Additionally, verbal memory significantly predicted iconic gesture use in both language groups, although in slightly different ways. These results are discussed with respect to the functional roles that working memory and gestures serve among monolingual and bilingual populations.