Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty

Many aspects of a new language, including grammar rules, can be acquired and accessed within minutes. In the present study, we investigate how initial learners respond when the rules of a novel language are not adhered to. Through spoken word-picture association-learning, tonal and non-tonal speakers were taught artificial words. Along with lexicosemantic content expressed by consonants, the words

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a DO dative bias (DOs appeared three times as often

Syntactic parsing plays a central role in the interpretation of sentences, but it is unclear to what extent non-native speakers can deploy native-like grammatical knowledge during online comprehension. The current eye-tracking study investigated how Chinese–English bilinguals and native English speakers respond to syntactic category and subcategorization information while reading sentences with object-subject

This study aimed to analyze whether there are differences between bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish) and monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) school children regarding reading and writing learning achievement, in executive functions (EF) components and metalinguistic abilities. Twenty-three bilingual and 23 monolingual children, aged 6 to 8 years, were assessed in terms of their writing, reading

In this study we investigated 107 young learners’ L2 English receptive vocabulary knowledge and speaking skills at two points in time, before and after the onset of instruction. We also investigated the role of several individual difference variables: out-of-school exposure to English, length of instruction, analytic reasoning ability, working memory, L1 vocabulary knowledge and prior L2 knowledge

To become fluent in a second language, learners need to acquire a large vocabulary. However, the cognitive and affective mechanisms that support word learning, particularly among second language learners, are only beginning to be understood. Prior research has focused on intentional learning and small artificial lexicons. In the current study investigating the sources of individual variability in word

Preregistration is an open science practice that requires the specification of research hypotheses and analysis plans before the data are inspected. Here, we discuss the benefits of preregistration for hypothesis-driven, confirmatory bilingualism research. Using examples from psycholinguistics and bilingualism, we illustrate how non-peer reviewed preregistrations can serve to implement a clean distinction

Interlocutors tend to refer to objects using the same names as each other. We investigated whether native and non-native interlocutors’ tendency to do so is influenced by speakers’ nativeness and by their beliefs about an interlocutor's nativeness. A native or non-native participant and a native or non-native confederate directed each other around a map to deliver objects to locations. We manipulated

Most studies on lexical priming have examined single words presented in isolation, despite language users rarely encountering words in such cases. The present study builds upon this by examining both within-language identity priming and across-language translation priming in sentential contexts. Highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals read sentence-question pairs, where the sentence contained

The current study explores how multilingual speakers with three typologically different languages (satellite-framed, verb-framed and equipollent-framed) encode and gauge event similarity in the domain of caused motion. Specifically, it addresses whether, and to what extent, the acquisition of an L2-English and an L3-Japanese reconstructs the lexicalization and conceptualization patterns established

Language control is important for bilinguals to produce words in the right language. While most previous studies investigated language control using visual stimuli with vocal responses, language control regarding auditory stimuli and manual responses was rarely examined. In the present study, an alternating language switching paradigm was used to investigate language control mechanism under two input

Applied linguistic work claims that multilinguals’ non-native languages interfere with one another based on similarities in cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. Two experiments explored how trilinguals regulate control of native- and non-native-language words. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals in a monitoring task. Participants decided if phonemes were present

This paper introduces the generalized additive mixed model (GAMM) and the quantile generalized additive mixed model (QGAMM) through reanalyses of bilinguals’ lexical decision data from Dijkstra et al. (2010) and Miwa et al. (2014). We illustrate how regression splines can be used to test for nonlinear effects of cross-language similarity in form as well as for controlling experimental trial effects

In the present study we challenge the generally accepted view based primarily on L1 data that surface linguistic information decays rapidly during reading and that only propositional information is retained in memory. In two eye-tracking experiments, we show that both L1 and L2 adult readers retain verbatim information of a text. In particular, the reading behaviour of L2 German learners revealed that

The present study aims to understand which factors contribute to different patterns of use of referring expressions by bilingual children, by considering the triangulation between language experience and proficiency, executive functions and cross-linguistic effects. We analyze reference use in Greek in the context of a narrative elicitation task as performed by 125 children of different language combinations

Meta-analysis overcomes a number of the limitations of traditional literature reviews (Norris & Ortega, 2006). Consequently, the use of meta-analysis as a synthetic technique has been applied across a range of scientific disciplines in recent decades. This paper seeks to formally introduce the potential of meta-analysis to the field of bilingualism. In doing so, we first describe a number of advantages

Numerous studies have investigated the neural correlates of reading in two languages. However, reliable conclusions have not been established as to the relationship of the neural correlates underlying reading in the first (L1) and second (L2) language. Here, we conduct meta-analyses to address this issue. We found that compared to L1, the left inferior parietal lobule showed greater activation during

This study investigated how bilingual experience alters neural mechanisms supporting novel word learning. We hypothesised that novel words elicit increased semantic activation in the larger bilingual lexicon, potentially stimulating stronger memory integration than in monolinguals. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals were trained on two sets of written Swahili–English word pairs, one

Much work has shown that differences in the timecourse of language processing are central to comparing native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers. However, estimating the onset of experimental effects in timecourse data presents several statistical problems including multiple comparisons and autocorrelation. We compare several approaches to tackling these problems and illustrate them using an L1-L2 visual

The masked translation priming effect was examined in Chinese–English bilinguals using lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks in an effort to understand why the two tasks seem to produce different patterns of results. A machine-learning approach was used to assess the participant-based factors that contribute to the sizes of translation priming effects in these tasks. As expected, the participant-based

While heritage language phonology has attracted a great deal of attention, little is known about the development of heritage phonological grammars. This study examines the production of the Spanish trill /r/ by school-aged (9-10 years) and adult heritage speakers. Results showed that the adult heritage speakers produced the trill in a more target-like manner than the child heritage speakers, although

High-Variability Phonetic Training (HVPT) has been shown to be effective in improving the perception of the hardest non-native sounds. However, it remains unclear whether such training can enhance phonological processing at the lexical level. The present study tested whether HVPT also improves word recognition. Late French learners of English completed eight online sessions of HVPT on the perception

Bilingualism as it occurs in current societies is a complex, multidimensional and dynamic phenomenon, calling for new approaches to capture this concept. This study shows the feasibility of a person-centred approach by combining measures of the use of and proficiency in the first and second language from 110 young Turkish–Dutch children at two measurement waves, using two existing datasets. Latent

This study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilities and vocabulary size to the phonolexical encoding of challenging non-native phonological contrasts into the L2 lexicon. Two groups of German learners of English differing in L2 proficiency (advanced vs. intermediate) participated in an English lexical decision task including words and nonwords with /ɛ/

Previous research has shown that heritage speakers struggle with inflectional morphology. ‘Limitations of online resources’ for processing a non-dominant language has been claimed as one possible reason for these difficulties. To date, however, there is very little experimental evidence on real-time language processing in heritage speakers. Here we report results from a masked priming experiment with

The assumption that everyday language switching trains bilinguals’ executive functions (EF) presupposes that language switching engages domain-general EF. This study examined associations between three types of tasks in a group of Finnish-English late bilinguals: everyday language switching frequency assessed with Ecological Momentary Assessment, language switching performance on a cued bilingual naming

Second language (L2) speakers produce speech more slowly than first language (L1) speakers. This may be due to a delay in lexical retrieval, but it is also possible that the delay is situated at later stages. This study used delayed picture naming to test whether late production stages (leading up to articulation) are slower in L2 than in L1. Dutch–English unbalanced bilinguals performed a regular

Speech perception involves both conceptual cues and perceptual cues. These, individually, have been shown to guide bilinguals’ speech perception; but their potential interaction has been ignored. Explicitly, bilinguals have been given perceptual cues that could be predicted by the conceptual cues. Therefore, to target the perceptual-conceptual interaction, we created a restricted range of perceptual

This study investigates how phonological and phonetic aspects of the native-language (L1) intonation modulate the use of tonal cues in second-language (L2) speech segmentation. Previous research suggested that prosodic learning is more difficult if the L1 and L2 intonations are phonologically similar but phonetically different (French–Korean) than if they are phonologically different (English–French/Korean)

The current study examined the impact of a speaker's gaze on novel-word learning in 4-5-year old monolingual (N = 23) and bilingual children (N = 24). Children were taught novel words when the speaker looked at the object both times while labeling it (consistent) and when the speaker looked at the object only the first time (inconsistent). During teaching, bilingual children differentiated between

Most research showing that cognates are named faster than non-cognates has focused on isolated word production which might not realistically reflect cognitive demands in sentence production. Here, we explored whether cognates elicit interference by examining error rates during sentence production, and how this interference is resolved by language control mechanisms. Twenty highly proficient Spanish–English

In two experiments, we examined the hypothesis that bilingual speakers modulate their cognitive control settings dynamically in the presence of different interlocutors, and this can be captured through performance on a non-linguistic attention task. We introduced Malayalam–English bilinguals to interlocutors with varying L2 dominance through a pre-experiment familiarisation and interaction phase. Later

Although bilinguals benefit from semantic context while perceiving speech-in-noise in their native language (L1), the extent to which bilinguals benefit from semantic context in their second language (L2) is unclear. Here, 57 highly proficient English–French/French–English bilinguals, who varied in L2 age of acquisition, performed a speech-perception-in-noise task in both languages while event-related

Previous work suggests that child-internal and -external factors influence dual language learning (DLL), although more work is needed – to clarify the role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and language exposure in particular. Accordingly, we investigated the role of language exposure and PSTM in phonological awareness and receptive and expressive vocabulary development in the majority language

Dual/multiple language use has been shown to affect cognition and its neural substrate, although the replicability of such findings varies, partially due to neglecting the role of interindividual variability in bilingual experience. To address this, we operationalized the main bilingual experience factors as continuous variables, investigating their effects on executive control performance and neural

Though previous research has shown that sentence repetition (SR) is an informative tool for identifying developmental language disorder (DLD) in bilinguals, little is understood about the skills that underlie children's performance on the task. With a population of 136 school-age Spanish–English bilinguals, the present study explores the contribution of verbal short-term memory, vocabulary, and language

Substantial research has examined cognition in aging bilinguals. However, less work has investigated the effects of aging on language itself in bilingualism. In this article I comprehensively review prior research on this topic, and interpret the evidence in light of current theories of aging and theories of bilingualism. First, aging indeed appears to affect bilinguals’ language performance, though

The topic of non-native language processing has been of steady interest in past decades. Yet, conclusions about the emotional responses in L2 have been highly variable. We conducted a large-scale rating study to explicitly measure how non-native readers of English respond to the valence and arousal of 2,628 English words. We investigated how the effect of a rater's L2 proficiency, length of time in

Low power in empirical studies can be compared to blurred vision. It makes the signal ambiguous, so that conclusions depend more on interpretation than on observation. Data patterns that look sensible are published as evidence for theoretical positions and unclear patterns are discarded as noise, whereas both could be due to sampling error or could be a perfect reflection of the population parameters

Spanish–English bilinguals rarely code-switch in the perfect structure between the Spanish auxiliary haber (“to have”) and the participle (e.g., “Ella ha voted”; “She has voted”). However, they are somewhat likely to switch in the progressive structure between the Spanish auxiliary estar (“to be”) and the participle (“Ella está voting”; “She is voting”). This phenomenon is known as the “auxiliary phrase

We examined how proficiency influences the processing of emotion words in Spanish–English bilinguals (22 balanced and 20 unbalanced). All unbalanced bilinguals were more proficient in English than Spanish. Participants rated the valence of negative, neutral, and positive words in both languages while EEG was being recorded. ERP latencies and amplitudes were analyzed for two components. The language

Languages differ in the preferences for the interpretation of the scope relation between negation and a quantifier. This study investigates the understudied issue of how interpretive preferences associated with a quantifier scope in learners’ L1 and L2 affect their scope interpretations in L3 acquisition. Based on the current models of L3 acquisition, we tested which language, L1 or L2, exerts a stronger

The term ‘metalinguistic’ is used to define the kind of ability whereby people for various purposes view language as an object. It is strongly associated with consciousness and touches on many aspects of literacy, multilingualism and language acquisition. Discussions in the research literature have generally been on specific aspects of metalinguistic knowledge: the time is ripe for a more fundamental

Does a concurrent verbal working memory (WM) load constrain cross-linguistic activation? In a visual world study, participants listened to Hindi (L1) or English (L2) spoken words and viewed a display containing the phonological cohort of the translation equivalent (TE cohort) of the spoken word and 3 distractors. Experiment 1 was administered without a load. Participants then maintained two or four

The current study analyzes Spanish present tense morphology with a focus on overregularization. It examines written production from two groups of English/Spanish bilingual children in a dual immersion setting, Spanish heritage language (SHL) speakers (n = 21) and Spanish second language (SL2) learners (n = 41), comparing them to age-matched (nine to ten years old) Spanish majority language children

This study examined whether the Foreign-Language effect, an increase in bilinguals’ rate of rational decisions to moral dilemmas in their foreign versus their native language, is influenced by emotion and the modality in which the dilemmas are presented. 154 Dutch–English bilinguals were asked to read and listen to personal and impersonal moral dilemmas in Dutch or in English. Importantly, the reading

Previous studies have investigated the cognitive processes of simultaneous interpreting and translation using eye-tracking. No study has yet utilized eye-tracking to investigate cognitive load and cognitive effort in dialogue interpreting. An eye-tracking study was conducted on two groups of interpreters (experienced and inexperienced) with varying language backgrounds during a staged dialogue interpreting

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,

Past studies have reported memory differences between monolingual and bilingual infants (Brito & Barr, 2012; Singh, Fu, Rahman, Hameed, Sanmugam, Agarwal, Jiang, Chong, Meaney & Rifkin-Graboi, 2015). A common critique within the bilingualism literature is the absence of socioeconomic indicators and/or a lack of socioeconomic diversity among participants. Previous research has demonstrated robust bilingual

Previous research has demonstrated that individual differences in conflict management predict second-language (L2) reading skill. The current experiment tested the hypothesis that this relation reflects the need to manage conflict from cross-linguistic interactions (CLI). A novel model specifying the relation between L2 reading skill, CLI, and the predictors of such interactions was tested in 253 L2

A bilingual exhibits a “semantic accent” when they comprehend or use a word in one language in a way that is influenced by its translation. Semantic accents are well-captured by feature-based models: however, few studies have specifically examined the processing of features that contribute to a semantic accent. Japanese–English bilinguals and monolinguals of each language completed three feature-based

Listeners can adapt to errors in foreign-accented speech, but not all errors are alike. We investigated whether exposure to unsystematic tone errors in second language Mandarin impacts responses to accurately produced words. Native Mandarin speakers completed a cross-modal priming task with words produced by foreign-accented talkers who either produced consistently correct tones, or frequent tone errors

Several multilingual language production models assume that language control is instigated by conflict monitoring. In turn, conflict adaptation, a control process which makes it easier to resolve interference if previously a high-interference context was detected, should also occur during multilingual production, as it is triggered by conflict monitoring. Because no evidence has been provided for conflict

Learning to pronounce a written word implies assigning a stress pattern to that word. This task can present a challenge for speakers of languages like Italian, in which stress information must often be computed from distributional properties of the language, especially for individuals learning Italian as a second language (L2). Here, we aimed to characterize the processes underlying the development

This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant

This study examined the extent to which language-switching practice enhanced L2 learners’ L2 grammatical processing by improving language selection abilities. Thirty-six English-speaking learners of French completed the same language-switching practice of L1 and L2 sentences, but received different types of pre-practice explicit information (EI) designed to address L2 learning difficulties resulting

This eye-tracking study establishes basic benchmarks of eye movements during reading in heritage language (HL) by Russian-speaking adults and adolescents of high (n = 21) and low proficiency (n = 27). Heritage speakers (HSs) read sentences in Cyrillic, and their eye movements were compared to those of Russian monolingual skilled adult readers, 8-year-old children and L2 learners. Reading patterns of

It has recently been suggested that bilingualism, rather than age of acquisition, is what underlies less than nativelike attainment in childhood L2 acquisition. Currently, however, the empirical evidence in favor of or against this interpretation remains scarce. The present study sets out to fill this gap, implementing a novel factorial design in which the variables age of acquisition and bilingualism

Under the Interface Hypothesis, bilinguals’ non-nativelike referential choices may be influenced by the increased cognitive demands and less automatic processing of bilingual production. We test this hypothesis by comparing pronoun production in the L2 of nonbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals to that of English monolinguals in two cognitively challenging contexts. In Experiment 1, both monolinguals