We introduce the blueprint of the Ontogenesis Model of the L2 Lexical Representation (OM) that focuses on the development of lexical representations. The OM has three dimensions: linguistic domains (phonological, orthographic, and semantic), mappings between domains, and networks of lexical representations. The model assumes that fuzziness is a pervasive property of the L2 lexicon: most L2 lexical representations are low resolution and the ontogenetic curve of their development does not reach the optimum (i.e., the ultimate stage of their attainment with optimal encoding) in one or more dimensions. We review the findings on lexical processing and vocabulary training to show that the OM has a potential to provide an interpretation for the results that have been treated separately and to move us forward in building a comprehensive model of L2 lexical acquisition and processing.

In the keynote article, “Bilingualism and Cognition”, Valian (2014) has reviewed current research on comparing executive function (EF) in monolingual and bilingual individuals across the lifespan. The conclusion is that there are inconsistent EF advantages from bilingualism and all other cognitive challenging activities primarily because individual differences in these cognitive challenging experiences may collectively attribute to superior EF resulting in inconsistent EF benefit attributable to a single experience. In essence, variability in study participants’ experience and tasks contributes to the inconsistency in the behavioral outcomes observed in monolinguals and bilinguals. Notably, Valian suggests that monolinguals may also engage in other cognitively challenging activities, which have not been accounted for in individual studies, thereby resulting in improved EF similar in magnitude to that related to bilingual experience. Although it was not specified which cognitively challenging activity is more likely to be engaged by monolinguals more than by bilinguals, the question at heart is: is there an EF advantage that can be specifically attributed to bilingual experience? The review addressed in the keynote demonstrates seemingly inconsistent patterns of results. In this commentary, I would like to suggest that, in addition to task measurements, individual bilingual experience is dynamic and multifaceted. Moreover, bilingual experience varies in different communities. Consequently, one potential source of explanation for the inconsistent results in between-group EF performances is the characteristics of the bilinguals (and monolinguals) and their social environments included in these studies.

Is bilingualism better than monolingualism? Previous work shows that bilinguals have an advantage over monolinguals in cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift between different mental sets. In this study, we explore if bilingualism also provides an advantage in social flexibility, which we define as the ability to (a) switch with ease and adapt between different social environments and (b) accurately read social cues in the environment. Data was collected from 465 monolinguals and 206 bilinguals. Bilinguals reported higher social flexibility than monolinguals. Mediation analyses demonstrated that bilinguals’ social flexibility gave them an advantage over monolinguals in the self-reported frequency of social interactions. This study reports the first evidence of a social flexibility advantage of bilinguals, and it suggests that as bilinguals alternate between two languages, they might also alternate between two cultural worlds, providing tools to adapt to different social environments and facilitating the frequency of social interactions.

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian–English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by the gender of the speaker, either a male or a female, and this varied over trials, where the target was spoken in a male voice the distractor was spoken in a female voice and vice versa. In contrast to other work showing a bilingual disadvantage in sentence comprehension under conditions of noise, we show that in this task, where voice permits selection of the target, adult bilingual speakers are in fact better able than their monolingual Italian peers to resist sentence-level interference when comprehension demands are high. Within bilingual speakers we also found that degree of proficiency in English correlated with the ability to resist interference for complex sentences both when the target and distractor were in Italian and when the target was in English and the distractor in Italian.

Spanish [l] is characterized as clear, and is associated with a high second formant (F2) frequency and a large difference between F2 and the first formant (F1) frequencies. In contrast, English [l] is darker (with a lower F2 and a relatively smaller F2–F1 difference) and also exhibits contextual variation due to an allophonic velarization rule that further darkens [l] postvocalically. We aimed to determine if Spanish–English bilingual children evidence these differences productively, in a manner comparable to that of monolinguals, or if they produce an [l] that is intermediate to that of Spanish and English monolinguals. We acoustically analyzed [l] productions of seven Spanish–English bilingual, seven Spanish monolingual, and seven English monolingual children. Results showed that the bilinguals had similar prevocalic F2 and F2–F1 values for [l] in both languages, comparable to those of Spanish monolinguals, but significantly higher than those of English monolinguals. The bilinguals also produced English (but not Spanish) [l] with significantly lower postvocalic F2 and F2–F1 values. We assume that the bilinguals have a merged phonetic category for prevocalic [l] but not postvocalic [l], and further, that they maintain separate grammars, allowing the allophonic velarization rule to apply in English but not Spanish.

This paper has two major objectives: (1) to summarise Processability Theory, a processing-oriented approach to explaining language development and (2) to utilise this theory in the comparison of development in LI and L2 acquisition. Proponents of the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (between L1 and L2) assume that L1 development can be explained with reference to Universal Grammar (UG) which, in their view, is inaccessible to L2 learners. Instead, they claim that a second language develops on the basis of language processing strategies.

I will show that the fundamentally different developmental paths inherent in first and second language acquisition can both be explained on the basis of the same language processing mechanics (as specified in Processability Theory). I will demonstrate that the developmental differences between L1 and L2 are caused by the qualitatively different early structural hypotheses which propagate through the acquisition process. The concept of “propagation of structural features” will be viewed as “generative entrenchment,” a logical-mathematical concept, which has proved to be highly productive in examining other kinds of developmental processes.

Although the extant literature provides robust evidence of the influence of language exposure and socioeconomic status (SES) on language acquisition, it is unknown how sensitive the early receptive vocabulary system is to these factors. The current study investigates effects of minimal second language exposure and SES on the comprehension vocabulary of 16-month-old children in the language in which they receive the greatest exposure. Study 1 revealed minimal second language exposure and SES exert significant and independent effects on a direct measure of vocabulary comprehension in English-dominant and English monolingual children (N = 72). In Study 2, we replicated the effect of minimal second language exposure in Spanish-dominant and Spanish monolingual children (N = 86), however no effect of SES on vocabulary was obtained. Our results emphasize the sensitivity of the language system to minimal changes in the environment in early development.

We used picture–word interference (PWI) to discover a) whether cross-language activation at the lexical level can yield phonological priming effects when languages do not share phonological representations, and b) whether semantic interference effects occur without articulatory competition. Bimodal bilinguals fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English named pictures in ASL while listening to distractor words that were 1) translation equivalents, 2) phonologically related to the target sign through translation, 3) semantically related, or 4) unrelated. Monolingual speakers named pictures in English. Production of ASL signs was facilitated by words that were phonologically related through translation and by translation equivalents, indicating that cross-language activation spreads from lexical to phonological levels for production. Semantic interference effects were not observed for bimodal bilinguals, providing some support for a post-lexical locus of semantic interference, but which we suggest may instead reflect time course differences in spoken and signed production in the PWI task.

We examine morphosyntactic knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut by Inuit receptive bilinguals (RBs) – heritage speakers who are capable of comprehension, but produce little or no speech. A grammaticality judgment study suggests that RBs possess sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations, though to a lesser degree than fluent bilinguals. Low-proficiency RBs are sensitive only to the most basic grammatical properties. Case omission is most difficult to detect, but morphemes bearing incorrect features (case oversuppliance, number agreement mismatch) or ordered incorrectly (tense and agreement, tense and negation) are easier, and performance on incorrect ordering of morphemes is near target with the core agreement morpheme for all RBs. While receptive bilinguals show patterns of grammatical deficits, they also demonstrate clear knowledge of the basic properties of word structure in Inuttitut. This has implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization efforts.

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children. Picture naming of objects and actions by Russian–German bilingual children (aged 4–7 years) was compared to age-matched monolingual children. The results clearly demonstrate a naming deficit of bilingual children in comparison to monolingual children that increases with age. Noun learning is more fragile in bilingual contexts than is verb learning. In bilingual language acquisition, nouns do not predominate over verbs as much as is seen in monolingual German and Russian children. The results are discussed with respect to semantic-conceptual aspects and language-specific features of nouns and verbs, and the impact of input on the acquisition of these word categories.

Second language acquisition studies can contribute to the body of research on the influence of language on thought by examining cognitive change as a result of second language learning. We conducted a longitudinal study that examined how the acquisition of Spanish grammatical gender influences categorization in native English-speaking adults. We asked whether learning the grammatical gender of Spanish affects adult native English speakers' attribution of gender to inanimate objects. College students enrolled in beginning Spanish participated in two tasks repeatedly (four times) throughout one academic year. One task examined their acquisition of grammatical gender. The other examined their categorization of inanimate objects. We began to observe changes in participants' grammatical gender acquisition and in categorization after ten weeks of Spanish instruction. Results indicate that learning a second language as an adult can change the way one categorizes objects. However, the effect of Spanish grammatical gender was more limited in Spanish learners than in native Spanish speakers; it was not observed for all kinds of objects nor did it increase with learners' proficiency, suggesting that adults learning Spanish reach a plateau beyond which changes in categorization do not occur.

This study compares mastery of gender assignment and agreement in Italian by adult Italian–German bilinguals who have acquired two languages simultaneously (2L1), and by adult German highly proficient second language learners (L2ers) of Italian. Our data show that incompleteness in bilingual acquisition and in second language (L2) acquisition primarily affects gender assignment: the categorization of nouns and the interpretable gender feature are subject to vulnerability in the two modalities of acquisition. Overall, mastery of morpho-syntax (i.e., gender agreement) was nearly native-like for both groups of speakers, suggesting that uninterpretable features are unlikely to be subject to vulnerability in the heritage language of adult bilingual speakers and can be acquired in adult L2 acquisition. Deviances from the target in gender assignment and, to a lesser extent, in gender agreement are attributed to both language-internal (i.e., language) and language-external factors (i.e., amount of input).

Previous studies have shown effects of bilingualism on inhibitory control in preschool children. However, these effects only held for ‘conflict tasks’, and not delay of gratification tasks, and other domains of executive functioning were not investigated. For older children, previous studies have found relationships between bilinguals’ advantages and home language environment. This study investigates effects of bilingualism and bilingual home language environment on executive functioning in three-year-old children. 200 bilingual and 829 monolingual three-year-olds performed tasks of inhibitory control, working memory, and selective attention. Home language environment characteristics were assessed through a parental questionnaire. The bilinguals outperformed the monolinguals on a conflict task only, and this effect was very small. Further analyses showed broader effects on inhibitory control that were related to home language environment: Bilinguals whose parents spoke different languages outperformed bilinguals whose parents spoke the same language on both the conflict task and a delay of gratification task.

It remains unclear whether adult-learned second language (L2) depends on similar or different neurocognitive mechanisms as those involved in first language (L1). We examined whether English past tense forms are computed similarly or differently by L1 and L2 English speakers, and what factors might affect this: regularity (regular vs. irregular verbs), length of L2 exposure (length of residence), age of L2 acquisition (age of arrival), L2 learners’ native language (Chinese vs. Spanish), and sex (male vs. female). Past tense frequency effects were used to examine the type of computation (composition vs. storage/retrieval). The results suggest that irregular past tenses are always stored. Regular past tenses, however, are either composed or stored, as a function of various factors: both sexes store regulars in L2, but only females in L1; greater lengths of residence lead to less dependence on storage, but only in females; higher adult ages of arrival lead to more reliance on storage. The findings suggest that inflected forms can rely on either the same or different mechanisms in L2 as they do in L1, and that this varies as a function of multiple interacting factors.

Recent research shows that speakers with different first languages perceive various cognitive domains in different ways and that bilinguals’ conceptualization patterns are affected by the concepts of both languages. The present study extends Choi and Bowerman (1991) by examining the categorizations of spatial concepts in adult Korean–English bilinguals. Using similarity judgments, the study compares the conceptualization patterns of “put in” and “put on” by Korean–English bilinguals and Korean and English monolinguals. Results indicated significant differences between the monolingual and bilingual groups, demonstrating the process of convergence of the two languages in the bilingual mind. Regression analyses also revealed that bilinguals’ conceptualizations are largely influenced by English proficiency and frequency of Korean use. These findings provide evidence of conceptual restructuring, supporting the claim of previous research that bilinguals’ conceptualization patterns are susceptible to their language experience.

A DST (Dynamic Systems Theory) characterization of L2 acquisition as an emergent process marks the coming of age of SLA research. It is an important theoretical maturation in that it brings together the many factors that interact in the complex system of language, learning, and use. It is an approach that has been budding for some time (Elman et al., 1996; Larsen-Freeman, 1997; MacWhinney, 1997; Ellis, 1998, 2003; Herdina and Jessner, 2002; Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, 2006), and recent symposia at AILA 2005, TESOL 2006 and AAAL 2006 conferences, and special issues in Applied Linguistics (2006) and here leave us heady with the scent of its blossom. What of fruition; what harvest shall we reap?

This study investigates Spanish heritage speakers' perception and production of Spanish lexical stress. Stress minimal pairs in various prosodic contexts were used to examine whether heritage speakers successfully identify the stress location despite varying suprasegmental cues (Experiment 1) and whether they use these cues in their production (Experiment 2). Heritage speakers' performance was compared to that of Spanish monolinguals and English L2 learners. In Experiment 1, the heritage speakers showed a clear advantage over the L2 learners and their performance was comparable to that of the monolinguals. In Experiment 2, both the heritage speakers and the L2 learners showed deviating patterns from the monolinguals; they produced a large overlap between paroxytones and oxytones, especially in duration. The discrepancy between heritage speakers' perception and production suggests that, while early exposure to heritage language is beneficial for the perception of heritage language speech sounds, this factor alone does not guarantee target-like production.

This issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition is about convergence, a type of language change that is contact-induced and results in greater similarity between two languages that are in contact with each other. In Backus (forthcoming), I have attempted an overview of contact-induced language change, focusing on causal factors, on mechanisms of change, and on the actual changes. In this conclusion, I will try to give convergence its rightful place in this general typology, referencing the contributions to this volume where appropriate.

The present article investigates the acquisition of the pronominal systems by French and Italian monolingual children and by bilingual German–French and German–Italian children, demonstrating a stable asymmetry: object and reflexive clitics are acquired later than nominative clitics and strong subject and object pronouns. We will widen the scope of former investigations to include the acquisition of strong pronouns and argue that the observed asymmetry can be accounted for if we combine the external (categorial status) and internal syntax of pronouns (internal structure). In particular, we argue for the relevance of the absence/presence of a nominal layer (N-layer) in the internal structure of a pronoun. This approach can account for the observation that pronouns containing an N-layer, i.e., strong subject pronouns, subject clitics and strong object pronouns, are acquired simultaneously and earlier than pronouns which lack the N-layer, i.e., object clitics and reflexive clitics.

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.