Most research on cognates has focused on words presented in isolation that are easily defined as cognate between L1 and L2. In contrast, this study investigates what counts as cognate in authentic texts and how such cognates are read. Participants with L1 Danish read news articles in their highly proficient L2, English, while their eye-movements were monitored. The experiment shows a cognate advantage for morphologically simple words, but only when cognateness is defined relative to translation equivalents that are appropriate in the context. For morphologically complex words, a cognate disadvantage is observed which may be due to problems of integrating cognate with non-cognate morphemes. The results show that fast non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon is conditioned by the communicative context. Importantly, a range of variables are statistically controlled in the regression analyses, including word predictability indexed by the conditional probability of each word.

Studies of the effects of bilingualism on cognition have given results that do not consistently replicate, reflecting at least in part wide differences in criteria for bilingualism and heterogeneity of language combinations within studied samples. We examined the bilingual advantage in attention, working memory and novel-word learning in early sequential Hindi–English bilinguals. We sought to clarify the aspects of cognition that benefit from bilingualism by using multiple measures and a sample sufficiently well-defined to permit independent replication. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals on response inhibition, novel-word learning and almost all working memory tasks. In contrast, both groups performed comparably on selective attention. Analyses of individual differences showed that bilingual novel-word learning was related to their verbal working memory and ability to inhibit an ongoing action, whereas this was not the case for monolinguals. Results indicate a specific bilingual advantage that is confined to some but not all aspects of cognition.

Previous studies have shown that bilinguals perform a production task faster when the item is gender-congruent across their two languages than when it is not. The current study aimed to explore three factors that might modulate this effect: the similarity of the gender systems, the need to retrieve grammatical gender to perform the task, and the role of a semantic variable (concreteness) in the processing of gender information. In Experiment 1, Russian–Spanish bilinguals showed gender-congruency effects whether they translated concrete nouns in isolation or in noun-phrases. In contrast, the effect was restricted to noun phrases when they translated abstract words. In Experiment 2, Italian–Spanish bilinguals showed the gender-congruency effect regardless of the translation task. However, the effect was larger with concrete nouns in comparison with abstract nouns. These results are discussed in terms of the proximity of bilingual gender systems and the relationship between semantics and gender.

The current study examined whether the vocabulary skills of sequential bilingual children who learned Cantonese as a home language (L1) and English as a second language (L2) were predicted by the amount of L1 and L2 used at home. Ninety-two preschool children who learned Cantonese as L1 were recruited from a Head Start program. The amounts of L1 and L2 used at home were measured using parent questionnaires. Mixed patterns of L1 and L2 use were found across family members and home activities. After controlling for time spent in preschool, regression analyses showed that the amount of L1 and L2 used by individual family members, with the exception of older siblings, was not significantly linked to children's vocabulary skills. In contrast, the language used during some home activities such as dinner and book reading significantly predicted children's vocabulary knowledge. Implications for family involvement in facilitating children's vocabulary development are discussed.

This comment responds to some of the criticisms that MacSwan (2005) presents of the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model of codeswitching (CS) in general and of Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross (2002), in particular. The goal is to point out misunderstandings and misinterpretations that are the basis of MacSwan's critique. His attempt to show how the Minimalist Program can explain CS on its own fails. Theoretically, while either of the participating languages in CS could frame the bilingual CP, only one, the ML, does. That is, recognizing the construct of the ML as the source of the morpho-syntactic frame of each bilingual clause showing CS is necessary.

DTI is an established method to study cerebral white-matter microstructure. Two established measures of DTI are fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) and both differ for bilingual and monolingual speakers. Less is known about differences in two other measures called radial (RD) and axial diffusivity (AD). We report differences in mean RD and AD-values in the right superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and forceps minor between bilingual (Hindi–English) and monolingual (English) speakers as well as differences in mean FA-values in the anterior thalamic radiation, right inferior fronto-occipital and inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) and mean MD-values in forceps minor and bilateral SLF. Noteworthy, a positive correlation between L2 proficiency and mean RD-values in the right SLF was observed. We suggest that changes in the geometry of white matter tracts reflect regular bilingual language experience and contend that neuroplasticity in right SLF results from demands on cognitive control for bilingual speakers.

The current study investigated whether Russian–English bilinguals activate knowledge of Russian when reading English sentences. Russian and English share only a few letters, but there are some interlingual homographs (e.g., POT, which means “mouth” in Russian). Critical sentences were written such that the Russian meaning of the homographs fit the context. Sentences presented to participants contained either the English translation of the Russian meaning of a homograph, an interlingual homograph, or a control word (e.g., TO SEE TOM'S THROAT, THE DOCTOR ASKED TOM TO OPEN HIS MOUTH/POT/NET WIDELY). Bilinguals showed a reduction in the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) signal for interlingual homographs compared to control words, whereas the N400 of monolingual English speakers was of a similar magnitude in the two conditions. The finding provides evidence that bilinguals automatically activate representations in both of their languages when reading in one language, even when the combination of a language-specific script and the preceding language context indicates that the other language is not relevant.

If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999) and extended it to explain bilingual effects from L2 to L1. Dutch–English bilinguals made a lexical decision on a Dutch target word preceded by a briefly presented word or nonword prime from Dutch (L1; Exp. 1) or English (L2; Exp. 2). The prime was an orthographically related neighbor of the target (e.g., zwaar–ZWAAN or spoon–SPION) or unrelated (e.g., thuis–ZWAAN or mouse–SPION). On their first presentation, responses to L1 word targets were non-significantly slowed relative to unrelated primes following both L1 and L2 related word primes. Upon target repetition, all effects turned into facilitation. Stable facilitation effects were also found when word targets were preceded by related nonwords derived from Dutch or English words. Simulations by the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model account for the major effects within and across languages.

This research note presents reactions to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross's (2005) response to MacSwan (2005), the latter offered as a response to Jake, Myers-Scotton and Gross (2002) and as a general critique of the MLF model of Myers-Scotton and colleagues. The note responds to the authors' analysis of various linguistic examples and to their continued assertion that the MLF model (and “matrix language” concept in particular) is necessary to any successful analysis of codeswitching data. The authors' critique of MacSwan's (2005) analysis of some Spanish–English DP facts is shown to fail, demonstrating that there is no “matrix language”. The note advocates that researchers reject across-the-board constraints on codeswitching in favor of a research agenda which relies upon independently motivated principles of grammar for the analysis of bilingual language data, with no codeswitching-specific mechanisms permitted.

The primary aim of my target article was to demonstrate how careful consideration of the working memory operations that underlie successful language comprehension is crucial to our understanding of the similarities and differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing. My central claims were that highly proficient L2 speakers construct similarly specified syntactic parses as L1 speakers, and that differences between L1 and L2 processing can be characterised in terms of L2 speakers being more prone to interference during memory retrieval operations. In explaining L1/L2 differences in this way, I argued a primary source of differences between L1 and L2 processing lies in how different populations of speakers weight cues that guide memory retrieval.

The present study investigates the automatization of second language (L2) sentence processing. It compares the extent to which a mere speedup (faster execution) and restructuring (more stable execution) of sentence processing contribute to L2 oral performance. The maze task is used to measure the speed (reaction time, RT) and processing stability (coefficient of variance, CV) of sentence processing. The elicited imitation (EI) task measures L2 oral proficiency (repetition accuracy and accuracy in plural and third person s). These tasks were performed by 110 English-as-a-foreign-language learners with Japanese as their L1. The results show that only RT, not CV, significantly predicts L2 oral proficiency. Even though a subgroup of learners, who previously stayed in an English-speaking country, demonstrated some indications of automatization, RT was a better predictor of L2 oral proficiency than CV, irrespective of immersion experience. These findings suggest that CV has little practical value in predicting L2 oral proficiency.

The present study investigated anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension. French–Spanish late bilinguals were presented with high-constrained Spanish sentences. ERPs were time-locked on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mis-matched the gender of the expected nouns triggered a negativity. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that words expected from the context were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than unexpected words, even though all were muted. Overall, the results suggest that anticipation processes are at play during L2 speech processing, and allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation.

This study compares the development and use of evaluative expressions in the English narratives elicited from 80 Chinese–English bilinguals and 80 American monolingual peers at four ages – five, eight, ten, and young adults – using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969). Results revealed both similarities and differences between monolingual and bilingual groups. On the one hand, regardless of bilingual status, there is a clear age-related growth in the development and use of evaluative expressions. On the other hand, bilingual children in our study differed from monolingual children in the quantity and quality of evaluative clauses used. The results are discussed with respect to linguistic and cultural differences between English and Chinese.

Bilingualism has been found to enhance the ability to store and manipulate information in working memory (WM). However, previous studies of WM function in bilingualism have been limited to behavioural measures, leaving questions unanswered regarding the effects of bilingualism on neural mechanisms employed during WM tasks. We recorded brain activity (event-related potentials; ERPs) while participants (23 English-speaking and 21 English–French bilinguals) performed an n-back WM task. Accuracy and reaction time were similar across groups, but monolinguals exhibited smaller P300 amplitudes relative to bilinguals, suggesting that bilinguals have more cognitive resources available to complete cognitively demanding tasks.

While morphological awareness has received much attention to date, little is understood about how morphological awareness develops within bilingual children learning typologically different languages. Therefore, we investigated children's knowledge of inflections and derivations in Japanese and English, and also asked whether morphological awareness in one language predicted morphological awareness in the other. To that end, 24 Japanese learners of L2 English (ESL) and 21 English learners of Japanese as a heritage language (JHL) were recruited and participated in a range of tasks assessing both vocabulary and morphological knowledge. Cross-linguistic contributions of morphological awareness were identified in both directions (Japanese ↔ English), after controlling for age, IQ, and vocabulary knowledge. This bidirectional transfer was, however, identified only in the ESL group. The group-specific and reciprocal transfer observed is discussed in terms of morphological complexities and relative competence in each language. The potential role of different types of L2 instruction in morphological development is also discussed.

This article reports on an investigation of changes in the grammatical competence of Germans living in the Netherlands. The participants (N = 52) were asked to give their judgments on the grammaticality of infinitive clauses in German. The judgments of this group were compared to those of a control group that lived in Germany and did not have contact with Dutch. The results revealed significant changes in the participants’ L1, which indicate transfer from the cognate L2, Dutch. Furthermore, it could be demonstrated that L2-induced changes can occur after a relatively short period of time, at least in the case of cognate languages.

Previous research showing a bilingual advantage on a variety of executive control tasks has typically compared monolinguals and fluent bilinguals. No study to date, however, has examined whether these effects endure for bilingual individuals who revert to monolingualism (‘lapsed bilinguals’). We investigated this question by testing monolinguals, full bilinguals, and lapsed bilinguals on a flanker task and a working memory task. Fully fluent bilinguals exhibited significantly more accurate performance than monolinguals on the working memory task, with lapsed bilinguals performing between the other two groups. Thus, continued bilingual experience appears necessary to maintain these cognitive advantages at a high level.

Using multiple languages may confer distinct advantages in cognitive control, yet it is unclear whether bilingualism is associated with better implicit statistical learning, a core cognitive ability underlying language. We tested bilingual adults on a challenging task requiring simultaneous learning of two miniature grammars characterized by different statistics. We found that participants learned each grammar significantly better than chance and both grammars equally well. Crucially, a validated continuous measure of bilingual dominance predicted accuracy scores for both artificial grammars in a generalized linear model. The study thus demonstrates the first graded advantage in learning novel statistical relations in adult bilinguals.

We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for all children, this finding is taken to be the result of a breakdown at the interface of the semantic lexicon and phonological representations, or access to them. The results complement similar research on English, a minimally inflected language in contrast to Greek. Overall, cross-linguistic word class effects provide strong evidence for the hypothesis that grammatical category is an organizing principle shared across languages. Finally, our results suggest that bilectal children with SLI present with general lexical delay rather than a deficit in verb naming per se.

We construct a production model of code-switched discourse, in order to explain empirical observations about switch point distribution, well-formedness of monolingual fragments, conservation of constituent structure and lack of constraint between successive switch points. The two monolingual grammars are modeled by congruent context-free phrase structure grammars. Each code-switched sentence makes alternate reference to two virtual monolingual sentences, one in each language, and, in the immediate vicinity of switch points, to their constituent structures. Imposing conservative conditions on when a constituent should be labeled as to language, and invoking a constraint against real-time “look-ahead” from one code-switch to the next, we prove that the existence of a consistent tree labeling, easily monitored by the speaker, implies a constraint on local equivalence of constituent order in the two languages around a switch point. This constitutes an explanation, without invoking a “code-switching grammar”, of the observed tendency for equivalence-point code-switching.