Native language (L1) processing draws on implicit expectations. An open question is whether non-native learners of a second language (L2) similarly draw on expectations, and whether these expectations are based on learners’ L1 or L2 knowledge. We approach this question by studying inverse preference effects on lexical encoding. L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish described motion events, while they were either primed to express path, manner, or neither. In line with other work, we find that L1 speakers adapted more strongly after primes that are unexpected in their L1. For L2 speakers, adaptation depended on their L2 proficiency: The least proficient speakers exhibited the inverse preference effect on adaptation based on what was unexpected in their L1; but the more proficient speakers were, the more they exhibited inverse preference effects based on what was unexpected in the L2. We discuss implications for L1 transfer and L2 acquisition.

This paper examines the syntax of GENDER CONCORD in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not, or if one of the languages has a ternary gender system and the other a binary one. We show that the English–Italian and French–German bilingual children in our study accommodate the gender properties of the noun to those of its modifiers in such cases, in order to ensure convergence.

It is well established that vocabulary size is related to efficiency in auditory processing, such that children with larger vocabularies recognize words faster than children with smaller vocabularies. The present study evaluates whether this relation is specific to the language being assessed, or related to general language or cognitive processes. Speed of word processing was measured longitudinally in Spanish- and English-learning monolinguals and bilinguals at 16 and 22 months of age. Speed of processing in bilinguals was similar to monolinguals, suggesting that the number of languages to which children are exposed does not influence word recognition. Further, cross-language associations in bilinguals suggest that the dominant language supports processing in the non-dominant language. These cross-language associations are consistent with general language and cognitive efficiency accounts in which the relation between word processing and knowledge relies on experience within a language as well as on general and cognitive properties of language learning.

Simultaneous interpreting is a complex cognitive task that requires the concurrent execution of multiple processes: listening, comprehension, conversion of a message from one language to another, speech production, and self-monitoring. This requires the deployment of an array of linguistic and cognitive control mechanisms that must coordinate the various brain systems implicated in handling these tasks. How the brain handles this challenge remains an open question, and recent brain imaging investigations have begun to complement the theories based on behavioural data. fMRI studies have shown that simultaneous interpreting engages a network of brain regions encompassing those implicated in speech perception and production, language switching, self-monitoring, and selection. Structural imaging studies have been carried out that also indicate modifications to a similar set of structures. In the present paper, we review the extant data and propose an integrative model of simultaneous interpreting that piggybacks on existing theories of multilingual language control.

Before bilingual children can say anything, they must learn to distinguish between the two languages that are spoken to them, and they must learn to make useful perceptual distinctions in each of them in order to understand what is said to them. Conversational interaction and non-verbal communication, such as pointing and gaze, aid children in attending to and processing aspects of their “language input environment” (De Houwer, 2009, 2011), “exposure” in Carroll's terms. As Carroll points out, children must build up their linguistic categories based on their intrinsically category-free “exposure”: they must process speech to acquire language. This reminds me of Wijnen's (2000) notion of language intake, which is the “data base children use to derive hypotheses on the structure of the target grammar” (p. 174), and which constitutes children's selection from what I will continue to call input, pace Carroll.

One hundred and sixty-eight young adult participants were classified as monolingual or bilingual and as having a previously reported clinical diagnosis of ADHD or not to create four groups. All participants completed tests of language proficiency, ADHD ratings, and executive control. Both bilingualism and ADHD are generally associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge, but bilingualism and ADHD are associated with opposite effects on executive control. Consistent with this literature, bilinguals performed more poorly than monolinguals on the vocabulary test but contrary to predictions, the ADHD group performed somewhat better on language ability than the non-ADHD group, attesting to their high functioning status. For the flanker task, both bilinguals and non-ADHD participants showed less cost in performing in the conflict condition than in the baseline condition. For the stop-signal task, ADHD status interfered more with performance by bilinguals than monolinguals, suggesting a greater burden of ADHD on executive function for this group.

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 HSs revealed longer mean fixation durations, lower skipping probabilities, and higher regressive saccade rates than in monolingual adults. High-proficient HSs were more similar to monolingual children, while low-proficient HSs performed on par with L2 learners. Low-proficient HSs differed from high-proficient HSs in exhibiting lower skipping probabilities, higher fixation counts, and larger frequency effects. Taken together, our findings are consistent with the weaker links account of bilingual language processing as well as the divergent attainment theory of HL.

The thesis in this paper is that L2 speakers differ from L1 speakers in their ability to do memory storage and retrieval about linguistic structure. We would like to suggest it is possible to go farther than this thesis and develop a computational-level theory which explains why this mechanistic difference between L2 and L1 speakers exists. For this purpose, we believe a noisy channel model (Shannon, 1948; Levy, 2008; Levy, Bicknell, Slattery & Rayner, 2009; Gibson, Bergen & Piantadosi, 2013) could be a good start. Under the reasonable assumption that L2 speakers have a less precise probabilistic representation of the syntax of their L2 language than L1 speakers do, the noisy channel model straightforwardly predicts that L2 comprehenders will depend more on world knowledge and discourse factors when interpreting and recalling utterances (cf. Gibson, Sandberg, Fedorenko, Bergen & Kiran, 2015, for this assumption applied to language processing for persons with aphasia). Also, under the assumption that L2 speakers assume a higher error rate than L1 speakers do, the noisy channel model predicts that they will be more affected by alternative parses which are not directly compatible with the form of an utterance.

Previous research has suggested that the advantages for cognitive control abilities in bilinguals are attenuated when socio-economic status (SES) is controlled (e.g., Morton & Harper, 2007). This study examined the effect of SES on cognitive control in illiterate monolingual and bilingual individuals who lived in adverse social conditions. We tested monolinguals and bilinguals using Simon and Attentional Network task while controlling for two potential confounding factors: SES and literacy. Bilinguals were faster for both trials with and without conflict demonstrating overall faster response times (global advantage) compared to monolinguals on both tasks. However, no bilingual advantage was found for conflict resolution on the Simon task and attentional networks on the Attentional Network task. The overall bilingual effects provide evidence for a bilingual advantage even among individuals without literacy skills and of very low SES. This indicates a strong link between bilingualism and cognitive control over and above effects of SES.

In the domain of bilingualism, a main issue of interest has been to determine whether the two languages are shared at a conceptual level and which variables modulate the access to the conceptual system. In this study, we focused on the effects of two variables related to word-type. We tested proficient unbalanced Spanish–English bilinguals in a masked translation priming paradigm conducted in the two translation directions (L1 to L2, and L2 to L1), by orthogonally manipulating for the first time concreteness and cognate status. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was also manipulated (50 ms vs 100 ms). Results revealed modulations in masked priming effects as a function of cognate status and translation direction. However, the effect of concreteness was only observed at the long SOA. The findings are discussed in light of the most relevant models of bilingual memory, mainly the Distributed Feature Model (de Groot, 1992a).

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 whether confederates referred to objects using a favored or disfavored name, while controlling for confederates’ language behavior. We found evidence of audience design for native and non-native addressees: participants were more likely to use a disfavored name after a non-native confederate used that name than after a native confederate used that name; this tendency did not differ between native and non-native participants. Results suggest that both native and non-native speakers can adapt to the language of non-native partners through non-automatic, goal-directed mechanisms of alignment during cognitively demanding communicative tasks.

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate how early and late bilinguals attain implicit knowledge of Korean case drop that necessitates integration of multiple levels of information. An oral picture description task and a written forced-choice elicitation task were developed to investigate how different populations employ the relevant factors in Korean case drop and if certain types of cues are more accessible than others. The results reveal qualitative differences in the underlying linguistic knowledge of early vs. late bilinguals with early bilinguals achieving a higher level of mastery than late bilinguals in both oral and written tasks. The results underline the importance of age, context, and mode of acquisition and suggest that bilingual difficulty in the present phenomenon mainly arises from learners heavily relying on cues that are readily available to them in their respective context of acquisition and failing to effectively coordinate multiple constraints.

This paper investigates whether there are changes in gesture rate when speakers of two languages with different gesture rates (Turkish-high gesture; Dutch-low gesture) come into daily contact. We analyzed gestures produced by second-generation heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands in each language, comparing them to monolingual baselines. We did not find differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers, possibly because bilinguals were proficient in both languages and used them frequently – in line with a usage-based approach to language. However, bilinguals produced more deictic gestures than monolinguals in both Turkish and Dutch, which we interpret as a bilingual strategy. Deictic gestures may help organize discourse by placing entities in gesture space and help reduce the cognitive load associated with being bilingual, e.g., inhibition cost. Therefore, gesture rate does not necessarily change in contact situations but might be modulated by frequency of language use, proficiency, and cognitive factors related to being bilingual.

The extant research suggests bilingualism is associated with enhanced cognitive effects, most evident in attention and executive functioning (EF). The current study examined the contributions of balance in the bilingualism (Spanish–English) of children to performance-based measures and caregiver ratings of EF. Participants included 30 bilingual children. Balance in children's bilingualism was correlated with caregiver ratings of task initiation. After controlling for demographic variables, balance in bilingualism significantly accounted for 37% of the variance in ratings of children's task initiation. Additional research is needed regarding associations between dual-language exposure, linguistic competence, and cognitive development in children.

A corpus analysis of phonological word-forms shows that English words have few phonological neighbors that are Spanish words. Concomitantly, Spanish words have few phonological neighbors that are English words. These observations appear to undermine certain accounts of bilingual language processing, and have significant implications for the processing and representation of word-forms in bilinguals.

This study examined the production of the Dutch past tense in Dutch–Hebrew bilingual children and investigated the effect of type of past tense allomorph (de versus te) and token frequency on productions of the past tense. Seven-year-old bilingual children (n=11) were compared with monolingual children: age-matched (n=30) and younger vocabulary-matched (n=21). Accuracy of regular and novel past tense was similar for the bilingual and monolingual groups, but the former group was worse on irregular past tense than the age-matched monolingual peers. All three groups showed effects of type frequency: te past tenses were more accurate than de. The difference between the bilingual and monolingual children surfaces in the extent of the effect: for the bilingual children it was most pronounced in verbs with low token frequency and novel verbs. Results are interpreted as stemming from a learning strategy or from phonological transfer from the Hebrew morphosyntactic system.

I had several goals in writing my keynote “Exposure and input in bilingual development”. The first was to emphasize that there are two components to the study of environmental effects on language learning. The first is the stuff ‘out there’ (exposure) that we want to observe and count and whose effects we want to assess; the second is the internal, mentally represented stuff (my input) that is logically related to a particular learning problem. Both exposure and input are indissociable from assumptions about what language acquisition mechanisms do and the nature of linguistic cognition. Accordingly, for example, a decision to count ‘words’ in child-directed speech (CDS) or via a parental questionnaire is not an innocent one. Not only can one find radically different views on what a ‘word’ is (Krause, Bosch & Clahsen, 2015), one can find work that questions the need to postulate such a unit at all (see discussion in MacWhinney, 2000). It follows that adopting a clear position, about which abstract mentally represented elements are crucial cues to learning some phenomenon, is an essential step in deciding what to count in CDS.

This study investigates child heritage speakers’ Spanish direct objects. A task designed to elicit direct objects was completed in Spanish and English by 40 child heritage speakers of Spanish in the U.S., and in Spanish by 24 monolingual children in Mexico. Both participant groups varied their direct object forms, following the same ranking: clitics>lexical NPs>omission>doubling. Animate referents promoted clitics; inanimate referents promoted lexical NPs. Among the heritage speakers, more Spanish experience and Spanish lexical proficiency predicted more clitic use (less omission and lexical NP use). We also argue that the child heritage speakers’ production of strong pronouns, more lexical NPs, and masculine clitic lo with inanimate feminine referents suggest English influence. The study underscores the importance of examining structured variation, which revealed both similarities and differences between heritage and monolingual speakers.

A 50ms prime duration is often adopted in both L1-L2 and L2-L1 directions in the cross-language priming paradigm. It is unknown how aware bilinguals are of the briefly presented primes of different scripts; and whether the degree of awareness of L1 and L2 primes is at a similar level. Kouider and Dupoux's (2004) proposal of partial awareness suggests that 50ms English primes were sufficient to make a semantic interpretation. It is unclear whether this is the case when processing one's L2 or a different script. Experiment 1 was designed to measure the comparable prime durations for semantic interpretation of Chinese primes vs. English primes. Experiment 2 tested whether partial awareness of primes would cause priming asymmetry. Our findings demonstrate that a 50ms prime duration gave rise to different degrees of semantic activation in different scripts and L1/L2. However, increasing prime duration on L2 primes did not produce L2-L1 priming.