Studying bilingualism is complicated. Baum and Titone's Keynote Article concludes with a discussion of three particularly thorny issues in bilingualism research: (a) bilinguals are not a homogeneous group, (b) bilingualism is not randomly assigned, and (c) the effects of bilingualism are often more complicated than simple advantages or disadvantages/delays. On this latter point, Baum and Titone consider how binary thinking about bilingualism as good or bad can limit the kinds of research questions that we ask. Here, I expand on this issue by showing how some apparent bilingual advantages and disadvantages can be illusory. I describe two examples of reasonable, justifiable, and prudent experimental designs that initially led to misleading conclusions about the effects of bilingualism on development. While both of these examples are drawn from research with bilingual infants, they nonetheless have implications for how we interpret the results of studies of bilingualism across the life span.

We examine the interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in Spanish–English bilingual adults, in contexts in which social–communicative cues (looking-only or looking-and-pointing) are used. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that pronoun interpretation is guided by the first-mention bias, which is modulated by the presence of the social–communicative cues both in monolinguals and in bilinguals. In Experiment 2, we show that if the speaker using the social–communicative cues is a non-native speaker of English, bilinguals rely more strongly on the social–communicative cues than monolinguals. Experiment 3 shows that stronger reliance on social–communicative cues in bilinguals’ interpretations is not the result of more accurate speech comprehension. Our results demonstrate that the ability to utilize the looking-only and looking-and-pointing cues is not driven by a superior ability to accurately read social cues in bilingual adults. In addition, monolinguals show lower sensitivity to the speaker’s intent when the speaker is a non-native speaker of English.

Research has suggested that children who speak African American English (AAE) have difficulty using features produced in Mainstream American English (MAE) but not AAE, to comprehend sentences in MAE. However, past studies mainly examined dialect features, such as verbal -s, that are produced as final consonants with shorter durations when produced in conversation which impacts their phonetic saliency. Therefore, it is unclear if previous results are due to the phonetic saliency of the feature or how AAE speakers process MAE dialect features more generally. This study evaluated if there were group differences in how AAE- and MAE-speaking children used the auxiliary verbs was and were, a dialect feature with increased phonetic saliency but produced differently between the dialects, to interpret sentences in MAE. Participants aged 6, 5–10, and 0 years, who spoke MAE or AAE, completed the DELV-ST, a vocabulary measure (PVT), and a sentence comprehension task. In the sentence comprehension task, participants heard sentences in MAE that had either unambiguous or ambiguous subjects. Sentences with ambiguous subjects were used to evaluate group differences in sentence comprehension. AAE-speaking children were less likely than MAE-speaking children to use the auxiliary verbs was and were to interpret sentences in MAE. Furthermore, dialect density was predictive of Black participant’s sensitivity to the auxiliary verb. This finding is consistent with how the auxiliary verb is produced between the two dialects: was is used to mark both singular and plural subjects in AAE, while MAE uses was for singular and were for plural subjects. This study demonstrated that even when the dialect feature is more phonetically salient, differences between how verb morphology is produced in AAE and MAE impact how AAE-speaking children comprehend MAE sentences.

Cross-linguistic priming in comprehension is understudied, and it remains unclear whether bilinguals have shared abstract syntactic representations during sentence comprehension. This article reports a self-paced reading experiment investigating the influence of Chinese passive relative clauses on the interpretation of English sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between an active main clause and a passive reduced relative (dispreferred) structure. The results showed that reading Chinese passive relative primes reduced processing difficulty in English targets at the dispreferred disambiguation. Chinese-to-English priming in comprehension occurred without lexical and word-order equivalence between primes and targets. In addition, translation-equivalent verbs did not boost cross-linguistic structural priming. The findings support an account under which bilingual sentence processing involves abstract, unordered syntactic representations that are integrated between languages.

The spatial agency bias predicts that people whose native language is rightward written will predominantly envisage action along the same direction. Two mechanisms contribute jointly to this asymmetry: (a) an embodied process related to writing/reading; (b) a linguistic regularity according to which sentence subjects (typically the agent) tend to precede objects (typically the recipient). Here we test a novel hypothesis in relation to the second mechanism, namely, that this asymmetry will be most pronounced in languages with rigid word order. A preregistered study on 14 European languages (n = 420) varying in word order flexibility confirmed a rightward bias in drawings of interactions between two people (agent and recipient). This bias was weaker in more flexible languages, confirming that embodied and linguistic features of language interact in producing it.

Working memory (WM) is one of the most studied cognitive constructs in psychology, because of its relevance to human performance, including language processing. When measuring verbal WM for sentences, the reading span task is the most widely used WM measure for this purpose. However, comparable sentence-level updating tasks are missing. Hence, we sought to develop a WM updating task, which we termed the selective updating of sentences (SUS) task, which taps the ability to constantly update sentences. In two experiments with Finnish-speaking young adults, we examined the internal consistency and concurrent validity of the SUS task. It exhibited adequate internal consistency and correlated positively with well-established working memory measures. Moreover, the SUS task also showed positive correlations with verbal episodic memory tasks employing sentences and paragraphs. These results indicate that the SUS task is a promising new task for psycholinguistic studies addressing verbal WM updating.

This study examined the conversational patterns of older children with their younger siblings. The sample included 26 nondisabled, 10 hearing impaired, 14 Down syndrome, and 13 developmentally delayed preschool children and their older, nondisabled siblings. Significant differences were found between the nondisabled and the disabled children. The siblings of disabled children appeared to be less conversationally sensitive with their brothers and sisters than the siblings of nondisabled children. Significant differences were also observed between the different types of disabilities. Few significant differences were found in variables believed to be facilitative of language development in the younger child, and those that were found tended not to be in the expected direction.

This study investigates the effect of an abstract word training paradigm initially developed to treat lexical retrieval deficits in patients with aphasia on second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition. Three English–Spanish L2 learners (Experiment 1) and 10 Spanish–English L2 learners (Experiment 3) were trained on 15 abstract words within a context-category (e.g., restaurant) using a five-step training paradigm based on semantic feature analysis. In addition, 7 English–Spanish L2 learners were trained on either abstract or concrete words within a context-category (Experiment 2). Across all experiments, the majority of participants trained on abstract words showed improved production of the trained abstract words, as measured by a word generation task, as well as improvement on untrained concrete words within the same context-category (i.e., generalization). Participants trained on concrete words (Experiment 2) exhibited much smaller word production gains and no generalization to abstract words. These results parallel previous findings from aphasia research and suggest that this training paradigm can successfully be extended to L2 learning contexts, where it has the potential to be a useful tool in vocabulary instruction. We discuss the findings in terms of models of spreading activation and the underlying conceptual representations of abstract and concrete words in the L2 lexicon.

The nature and causes of language disorders are research topics familiar to the readership of Applied Psycholinguistics. Current inquiries place these topics in a dynamic and sprawling multidisciplinary context manifested through investigations of linguistic acquisition, cognitive development, genetics, neurocortical processes, cognitive neurolinguistics, behavioral phenotypes, and language intervention. This list is not complete by any means, but it does suggest the wide front of the current search for better knowledge about what causes language disorders and the dimensions of language acquisition that are affected. Although there is considerable momentum underway in current inquiries, the full potential for scientific advancement is hampered by fragmentation in the field, in part attributable to partitioning by diagnostic categories of affectedness. Investigators (and their funding sources) often focus on a particular clinical group, such as specific language impairment (SLI), autism/autism spectrum disorders (ASD), Williams syndrome (WS), Down syndrome (DS), or fragile X syndrome (FXS). Although this is not exclusively the case, it is relatively difficult to carry out comparative studies across the multiple clinical conditions in which language disorders appear and to monitor developments across such a wide front of investigation. The consequence is that findings are distributed across different publication outlets and different groups of scholars, a situation that can limit our appreciation of the ways in which language disorders are manifest, and the identification of common etiological factors.

In the Keynote Article, “The Interface Between Bilingual Development and Specific Language Impairment,” Johanne Paradis considers issues and evidence at the intersection of children learning two languages and primary or specific language impairment (SLI). The review focuses on morphosyntactic evidence and the fit of this evidence with maturational (domain-specific) and limited processing capacity (LPC; domain-general) theories of language impairment. We agree with Paradis that studies that systematically and simultaneously investigate the behavioral profile of dual-language learners and children with language impairment are of significant theoretical and practical value. In our commentary we aim to broaden the behavioral profile to be considered in these populations, beyond the level of morphosyntax. In line with this aim we use the term primary language impairment (PLI) for the same population referred to as SLI by Paradis.

This study examined the effects of the age of acquisition (AOA) and semantic transparency on the reading aloud ability of a Chinese dyslexic individual, TWT, who relied on the semantic pathway to name characters. Both AOA and semantic transparency significantly predicted naming accuracy and distinguished the occurrence of correct responses and semantic errors from other errors. A post hoc analysis of subsets of items orthogonally varied in the AOA and semantic transparency revealed an interaction between the two variables. These findings converge on reports of AOA and semantic effects on deep dyslexic individuals reading alphabetic scripts. The case of TWT, together with recent results of another Chinese dyslexic individual who reads via the nonsemantic route and exhibits the effects of AOA and phonological consistency, supports the arbitrary mapping hypothesis, which states that the AOA effect resides in the connection between two levels of representation.

An experiment and a follow-up study were conducted with Brazilian Portuguese-speaking kindergartners (N =90), mean age 53 months, to examine whether emergent readers benefit more from instruction in orthographic mapping (OM) of phonemes than OM of syllables at the outset of learning to read and write, and whether the addition of articulatory gestures in the OM training of phonemes enhances the benefit. In the experiment, children received instruction in small groups in one of four conditions: OM of phonemes with letters and articulation (OMP+A); OM of phonemes with letters but no articulation (OMP); OM of syllables and their spellings (OMS); and no OM control. Results showed that the OMP+A group outperformed the others in phonemic segmentation, reading, and spelling. On literacy assessments 1.5 years later, only the OMP+A group remembered how to segment words into phonemes. We conclude that despite the greater salience and accessibility of syllables than phonemes in spoken Portuguese, teaching phonemic OM better prepares emergent readers to move into reading and spelling than teaching syllabic OM. Moreover, instruction that includes articulation as well as letters to segment words is especially effective. Results support a graphophonemic connectionist theory of emergent reading and spelling.

In line with the recent trend in comparative analysis of different populations (see Friedmann & Rusou, 2015, as an example), Pierce, Genesee, Delcenserie, and Morgan (2017) present a comprehensive review of different language outcomes in populations that have received qualitatively and quantitatively different input during the first year of life, from enriched stimuli in bilingual situations to no stimuli at all in the case of children with profound hearing impairment. The claims derived from these data deserve some comment, however, and need some caveats about the measures used, which I will provide in the following with a brief discussion of complementing research and the presentation of some new data derived from the Bilingual Language Development (BiLaD) Project, a recent French/German collaboration studying bilingual populations with and without specific language impairment (SLI).

Many studies show that it is challenging to encode morphosyntactic information while writing. Spelling plurals is especially demanding in French as these are inaudible. Even by the end of primary school, monolingual French pupils still have difficulties marking plurals of some grammatical categories. We investigate (1) how multilingual pupils learning French as a second written language deal with silent plural markers and (2) the effects of a morphosyntactic training explicitly focussing on grammatical categories and their markers, as well as visualizing the plural agreement. 228 fifth graders were quasi-randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 137) and a control group (n = 91) based on the results of a spelling pre-test. The results of the pre-test show that multilingual learners have similar spelling patterns as French monolinguals. They pluralize nouns more accurately than verbs and perform lowest on adjectives. After the pre-test, both groups were trained over six sessions of 20 minutes. The control group participated in French listening comprehension activities. The post-test shows that the intervention group significantly improved in spelling plurals compared to the control group. A greater focus on morphosyntactic structures is highly effective especially in second language contexts where children might lack broad lexical knowledge.

The present study examines the relative processing efficiency of two typologically diverse configurations of sentential negation: immediately preverbal NEG and unbounded clause-final NEG. In order to effect a head-to-head comparison, the data are drawn from a bilingual speech community in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, in which two lexically cognate languages are in contact, differing principally in the placement of the sentential negator: Spanish (preverbal NEG) and the Afro-Hispanic creole language Palenquero (clause-final NEG). The results of a series of experiments suggest that preverbal negation is quite robust, while processing of clause-final negation is degraded under increased cognitive demands. Contextual and pragmatic cues ameliorate the processing of likely negative utterances, while unbounded clause-final negation is more vulnerable in ambiguous utterances. The contrasting behavior of Spanish and Palenquero negation highlights the possible role of processing mechanisms as contributing to typological differences among languages.

Memory for speech benefits from linguistic structure. Recall is better for sentences than for random strings of words (the “sentence superiority effect”; SSE), and evidence suggests that ongoing speech may be organized advantageously as clauses in memory (recall by word position shows within-clause U shape). In this study, we examined the SSE and clause-based organization for closed-set speech materials with low semantic predictability and without typical prosody. An overall SSE was observed and accuracy by word position was enhanced at the clause boundaries for these materials. Next, we tested the effects of mental manipulation on the SSE and clause-based organization. Listeners heard word strings that were syntactic, were arranged syntactically then presented backwards, or were random draws. Participants responded to materials as presented or in reversed order, requiring mental manipulation. Clause-level organization was apparent only for materials presented in syntactic order regardless of response order. After accounting for benefits due to reductions in uncertainty for these close-set materials, an SSE was present for syntactic materials regardless of response order, and for the syntactic backwards condition with reverse-order response (yielding a syntactically correct sentence in the response). Thus, the SSE was both resistant to and could be obtained following mental manipulation.

The current study investigates cross-linguistic influence of second language (L2) learning on native language (L1) processing of morphosyntactic variation in proficient L2 learners immersed in their L1. Despite Spanish pre- and postverbal clitic pronoun positions being grammatical in complex verb phrases, preferences of use have been well attested in naturalistic language production. To examine whether those preferences obtain for comprehension in monolinguals, as well as how those preferences might be modulated by learning an L2 with fixed pronoun positions, we administered a self-paced reading experiment to 20 Spanish monolinguals as well as 22 proficient learners English (L1 Spanish). The results of a Bayesian mixed effects regression analysis suggest that preferences in production are echoed in comprehension—but only for the monolingual group. We find support for facilitation in the bilingual group precisely where both languages overlap, as well as evidence that bilinguals may not use clitic position as a reliable cue at all. We interpret the results as evidence that learning an L2 that lacks variation for a particular feature may lead to reduced sensitivity to that feature as a cue in an analogous L1 structure. We situate these results in an experience-based, shared-syntax account of language processing.

Using a self-paced reading task, the study aimed to investigate (a) whether English learners in Taiwan immediately resolve main verb versus reduced relative clause ambiguities in a similar way as native English speakers and (b) whether the learners at various English proficiency levels show diverse profiles. With analyses and syntheses of reading times for critical segments, results showed that different proficiency groups of Taiwanese English learners resolved such ambiguities in a way similar to native speakers to varying extents. The findings suggest that the sentence-processing mechanism of human language is subject to sufficient facility with syntactic access and/or with a network of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information of individual speakers.

The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish- and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (Mage 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (Mage 7.8), 24 children with the same linguistic level (Mage 6.8 years), and 24 adults (Mage 22.5 years). Empirical data revealed that children with DLD can comprehend verbal tense, at least in the present experimental conditions. Based on the empirical results and despite some minor differences between the DLD group and the chronological control group, we suggest that tense morphology comprehension in DLD might be more typical than what is generally considered. Additionally, we propose that verbal comprehension difficulties in children with DLD might be less related to the lack of understanding of specific morphological markers, and more to an accumulation of difficulty which leads to a linguistic processing slowdown.

American Sign Language (ASL) and English differ in linguistic resources available to express visual–spatial information. In a referential communication task, we examined the effect of language modality on the creation and mutual acceptance of reference to non-nameable figures. In both languages, description times reduced over iterations and references to the figures’ geometric properties (“shape-based reference”) declined over time in favor of expressions describing the figures’ resemblance to nameable objects (“analogy-based reference”). ASL signers maintained a preference for shape-based reference until the final (sixth) round, while English speakers transitioned toward analogy-based reference by Round 3. Analogy-based references were more time efficient (associated with shorter round description times). Round completion times were longer for ASL than for English, possibly due to gaze demands of the task and/or to more shape-based descriptions. Signers’ referring expressions remained unaffected by figure complexity while speakers preferred analogy-based expressions for complex figures and shape-based expressions for simple figures. Like speech, co-speech gestures decreased over iterations. Gestures primarily accompanied shape-based references, but listeners rarely looked at these gestures, suggesting that they were recruited to aid the speaker rather than the addressee. Overall, different linguistic resources (classifier constructions vs. geometric vocabulary) imposed distinct demands on referring strategies in ASL and English.