The putative bilingual executive advantage has been argued to stem from lifelong experience with executively demanding language behaviors, such as switching between the two languages. However, studies testing for possible associations between language switching frequency and EF in bilinguals have yielded inconsistent results. One reason for this could lie in the methods used that have evaluated the frequency and type of language switches with retrospective self-reports, as well as in problems in reliability and convergent validity of the executive tasks. By using Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) as a reference point for self-reports of language switches, we examined the validity of general retrospective self-reports of language switching. Additionally, we examined associations between language switching and EF using multilevel models. Our results indicated that the commonly used retrospective self-reports of language switching may lack convergent validity. However, we found tentative evidence that contextual language switches, assessed with EMA, may be associated with better inhibitory control, set shifting, and working memory.

Metasyntactic Ability (MSA) refers to the conscious reflection about syntactic aspects of language and the deliberate control of these aspects (Gombert, 1992). It appears from previous studies that heritage-language learners tend to demonstrate lower MSA than their monolingual counterparts (Lesaux & Siegel, 2003). In the present study, we verified whether the same results would be obtained among Portuguese heritage children living in a French-speaking environment when their MSA is measured using two different tasks. The participants were 22 Portuguese heritage children and 22 French monolingual elementary school children (mean age = 10.9 years). Five measurement instruments were used: a reading comprehension task; a language proficiency task; two metasyntactic tasks: a replication task in which the children had to identify and reproduce an error, and a repetition task, in which they had to repeat sentences containing syntactic errors; and a sociodemographic questionnaire. The results showed that when reading comprehension and language proficiency were controlled for, no effect of language background could be observed. However, reading comprehension and language proficiency differently influenced performances on MSA tasks.

Gestures serve many functions, including aiding language access and message construction, particularly in spatial tasks. Some researchers have argued that gesture frequency is linked to proficiency in bilinguals, although results have been inconsistent. We tested Nicoladis’ (2007) proposal that bilinguals’ proficiency interacts with task: namely, more spatial tasks elicit greater proficiency effects. French–English bilinguals completed a cartoon-retell task (high spatial) and an interview task (low spatial) in both languages. We measured bilingual proficiency categorically by first language (L1) and continuously by assessing receptive vocabulary, oral fluency, and word types. Participants gestured more in the cartoon-retell task, but there were minimal proficiency effects and no interactions between proficiency and task. Interestingly, only participants with English as their L1 gestured more in their second language (L2), potentially due to ‘rustiness’, or lexical access difficulties in French from low usage in the majority English community.

This paper provides a concise overview of the cross-modal priming methodology, it presents a selection of key studies to illustrate how this method can be used to address lexical and syntactic processing and discusses advantages and disadvantages, along with issues that need to be taken into consideration when designing studies that address sentence processing in bilinguals.

Bilinguals sometimes outperform monolinguals on tasks involving cognitive control – the regulation of mental activity when confronted with information-processing conflict – perhaps stemming from experience monitoring for and resolving conflict between languages. We test the hypothesis that bilingualism affects moment-to-moment cognitive-control recruitment by examining how trial history influences bilinguals’ and monolinguals’ behavioral performance and associated neural activity on a Stroop task. We assessed dynamic effects of preceding trial conflict on current trial performance to separate the ability to proactively detect conflict (performance on new instances of conflict) from the ability to reactively recruit cognitive control (performance on trials following conflict). Across two experiments, monolinguals’ – but not bilinguals’ – accuracy decreased after non-conflict trials, i.e., when detecting initial conflicts. Bilinguals exhibited greater conflict-detection activity in ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC/insula; BA 47) within a language-switching network, suggesting that they may monitor for information-conflict more proactively than monolinguals by recruiting brain regions involved in switching languages.

Neuropsychological theories raise the question if in late bilinguals with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT), the second language (L2) may be more impaired than the first (L1). We compared language performance in different tasks of oral comprehension (semantic and syntactic) and production (naming, repetition and fluency) in L1 and L2 in a group of 13 late proficient bilinguals wit DAT immersion, and a matched control group of 12 healthy late bilinguals. Two-way mixed repeated-measure ANOVAs with factors Language and Group revealed main effects of Group (p < .05) indicating that DAT affects all aspects of language. There was no Group × Language interaction, suggesting that DAT affects both languages similarly. Our study thus shows that neurodegenerative diseases affect L1 and L2 in a parallel manner, particularly at the levels of semantic, lexical and syntactic processing. These results speak in favour of a shared L1 and L2 network in late bilinguals.

Mandarin speakers often use gestures to represent time laterally, vertically, and sagittally. Chinese Sign Language (CSL) users also exploit signs for that purpose, and can differ from the gestures of Mandarin speakers in their choices of axes and direction of sagittal movements. The effects of sign language on co-speech gestures about time were investigated by comparing spontaneous temporal gestures of late bimodal bilinguals (Mandarin learners of CSL) and non-signing Mandarin speakers. Spontaneous gestures were elicited via a wordlist definition task. In addition to effects of temporal words on temporal gestures, results showed significant effects of sign. Compared with non-signers, late bimodal bilinguals (1) produced more sagittal but fewer lateral temporal gestures; and (2) exhibited a different temporal orientation of sagittal gestures, as they were more likely to gesture past events to their back. In conclusion, bodily experience of sign language can not only impact the nature of co-speech gestures, but also spatio-motoric thinking and abstract space-time mappings.

We examine the variable use of locative prepositions in Cajun French, adding two dimensions to existing studies: real-time evidence, adding a diachronic descriptive perspective, and a methodological tool, measuring the degree of exposure to French (MDI). The goal of this paper is to determine the origins and the directions of language change within the system of locative prepositions. The majority of the interviews are taken from the Cajun French/English corpus, conducted by Dubois in 1997. Our results indicate that the restricted speakers use an array of innovative forms in all locative categories. Systemic and extralinguistic evidence show that some of these forms represent interference-induced innovations, while others are internally-motivated innovations stimulated in an indirect way by language contact. A model of change emerges where the older restricted speakers introduce changes that are gradually adopted by the following generations, regardless of the extent to which their linguistic ability in Cajun French is diminished.

The current study examined if bilingual advantages in cognitive control influence memory encoding during a divided attention task. Monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, and sequential bilinguals switched between classifying objects and words, then were tested for their recognition memory of stimuli previously seen during the classification task. Compared to bilingual groups, monolinguals made the most errors on the classification task and simultaneous bilinguals committed the fewest errors. On the memory task, however, no differences were found between the three language groups, but significant correlations were found between the number of errors during switch trials on the classification task and recognition memory for both target and non-target stimuli. For bilinguals, their age of second language acquisition partially accounted for the association between attentional control (number of switch errors) and subsequent memory for non-target stimuli only. These results contribute to our understanding of how individual differences in language acquisition influence interactions between cognitive domains.

This study investigated the phonological preparation unit when planning spoken words with native Chinese speakers who speak English as a Second Language (ESLs). In Experiment 1, native Chinese speakers named pictures in Chinese, and the names shared the same onset, same rhyme, or had nothing systematically in common. No onset effect was shown, suggesting that native Chinese speakers did not use onset as their preparation unit. There was a rhyme interference effect, probably due to lexical competition. In Experiment 2, the same task was conducted in English among Chinese ESLs and native English speakers. Native speakers showed onset facilitation whereas ESLs did not show such an effect until Block 3. ESLs’ phonological preparation unit is likely to be influenced by their native language but with repetition they are able to attend to sub-syllabic units. Both groups showed rhyme interference, possibly as a result of joint lexical and phonological competition.

We investigated whether speaking in one language affects cross- and within-language activation when subsequently switching to a task performed in the same or different language. English–French bilinguals (L1 English, n = 29; L1 French, n = 28) were randomly assigned to a prior language context condition consisting of a spontaneous production task in English (the no-switch group) or in French (the switch group). Participants then performed an English spoken language comprehension task using the visual world method. The key result was that the switch group showed less evidence of cross-language competition than the no-switch group, consistent with the notion of an active inhibition of a prior language in the switch group. These data suggest that proficient bilinguals can globally suppress a non-target language, whether it is L1 or L2, though doing so requires cognitive resources that may be diverted from other demands, such as controlling within-language competition.

In analyzing code-switching in spoken languages, Chan (2003, 2008) proposes that only functional heads with their associated language determine the order of the complement. In this paper, we examine whether Chan's analysis can account for code-blending in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) and Cantonese by a deaf child (2;0.26–6;6.26) and three deaf adult native signers. HKSL and Cantonese differ in head directionality so far as the functional elements of modals, negators, and auxiliaries are concerned. They are head-final in HKSL but head-initial in Cantonese. The HKSL–Cantonese code-blending data in this study largely conform to Chan's analysis, where the order of the complement is determined by which language the functional head appears in. However, code-blending the functional heads of a similar category in both languages leads to either order of the complement. Also, the deaf child's apparent violations of adult HKSL grammar reveal crosslinguistic influence from Cantonese to HKSL during code-blending.

We report two offline and two eye-movement experiments examining non-native (L2) sentence processing during and after reanalysis of temporarily ambiguous sentences like “While Mary dressed the baby laughed happily”. Such sentences cause reanalysis at the main clause verb (“laughed”), as the temporarily ambiguous noun phrase (“the baby”) may initially be misanalysed as the direct object of the subordinate clause verb (“dressed”). The offline experiments revealed that L2ers have difficulty reanalysing temporarily ambiguous sentences with a greater persistence of the initially assigned misinterpretation than native (L1) speakers. In the eye-movement experiments, we found that L2ers complete reanalysis similarly to L1ers but fail to fully erase the memory trace of the initially assigned interpretation. Our results suggested that the source of L2 reanalysis difficulty is a failure to erase the initially assigned misinterpretation from memory rather than a failure to conduct syntactic reanalysis.

We investigated the extent to which second-language (L2) learning is influenced by the similarity of grammatical features in one's first language (L1). We used event-related potentials to identify neural signatures of a novel grammatical rule – grammatical gender – in L1 English speakers. Of interest was whether individual differences in L2 proficiency and age of acquisition (AoA) influenced these effects. L2 and native speakers of French read French sentences that were grammatically correct, or contained either a grammatical gender or word order violation. Proficiency and AoA predicted Left Anterior Negativity amplitude, with structure violations driving the proficiency effect and gender violations driving the AoA effect. Proficiency, group, and AoA predicted P600 amplitude for gender violations but not structure violations. Different effects of grammatical gender and structure violations indicate that L2 speakers engage novel grammatical processes differently from L1 speakers and that this varies appreciably based on both AoA and proficiency.

This study explored how bilingual code-switching habits affect cognitive shifting and inhibition. Habitual code-switching from 31 Mandarin–English bilingual adults were collected through the Language and Social Background Questionnaire (Anderson, Mak, Keyvani Chahi & Bialystok, 2018) and the Bilingual Switching Questionnaire (Rodriguez-Fornells, Krämer, Lorenzo-Seva, Festman & Münte, 2012). All participants performed verbal and nonverbal switching tasks, including the verbal fluency task, a bilingual picture-naming and colour-shape switching task. A Go/No-go task was administered to measure the inhibitory control of participants.

Frequent bilingual switchers showed higher efficiency in both English to Chinese verbal switching and nonverbal cognitive shifting. Additionally, bilinguals with intensive dense code-switching experience outperformed in the Go/No-go task. In general, the study revealed the connections between bilinguals’ intensity of single-language context experience and goal maintenance efficiency, which partially supported the Adaptive Control Hypothesis’ prediction (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). Besides, it also indicated the facilitations of bilinguals’ dense code-switching experience on their conflicts monitoring and response inhibition.

The issue of whether bilinguals have advantages over monolinguals in cognitive functions has received ongoing research attention. Most researchers have agreed that continuously shifting between two languages enhances bilinguals' executive function, but several recent studies failed to find any evidence of bilingual advantage. In addition, the mechanism of bilingual advantage in executive function is not fully understood. Here, we hypothesized that a bilingual advantage should appear on tasks requiring an enhanced level of executive function, and tested this hypothesis in a non-language-based mixed culture context and single culture context. Proficient bilinguals and non-proficient bilinguals completed an Eriksen Flanker Task in these two contexts. The results showed that proficient bilinguals’ performance on incongruent trials was better than that of non-proficient bilinguals in the mixed cultural context, but not in the single cultural context. These findings cast important light on understanding the nature of bilingual advantage.

Much research has been dedicated to the effects of bilingualism on executive control (EC). For bilinguals with aphasia, the interplay with EC is complex. In this systematic review, we synthesize research on this topic and provide an overview of the current state of the field. First, we examine the evidence for EC deficits in bilingual persons with aphasia (bPWA). We then discuss the domain generality of bilingual language control impairments. Finally, we evaluate the bilingual advantage hypothesis in bPWA. We conclude that (1) EC impairments in bPWA are frequently observed, (2) experimental results on the relationship between linguistic and domain-general control are mixed, (3) bPWA with language control problems in everyday communication have domain-general EC problems, and (4) there are indications for EC advantages in bPWA. We end with directions for experimental work that could provide better insight into the intricate relationship between EC and bilingual aphasia.

Mayberry and Kluender (2017) offer a rich review of empirical research that contributes to the understanding of age-related effects on first and second language acquisition. Their keynote article compiles current, primarily linguistic and neurolinguistic, research on the notion of a critical period for language (CPL). The authors conclude “that the putative CPL applies to L1 learning, and that L2 effects are a consequence of this prior learning” (Mayberry & Kluender, 2017: p. 6). As they propose a clear role for CPL in L1 learning, and because their exact position on its role in L2 learning is, to my mind, not as clearly articulated, I will take the opportunity to argue the following: If a CPL exists at all, it should have identifiable implications for all kinds of language acquisition (cf. Gleitman & Newport, 1995). In the case of L2 acquisition what needs to be identified is how maturational constraints (implicated by a CPL) interact with other conditions that are at hand when the second language comes onto the scene.

We begin with the hypothesis that all people are “bilingual” because every language contains ingredients from several grammars, just as English exhibits both an Anglo-Saxon and a Latinate vocabulary system. We argue that the dominant grammar is defined by productivity and recursion in particular. Although current evidence is sparse, in principle, for a child who shows Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in a bilingual environment, richer modules in one grammar may help trigger more obscure modules in another language. Thus, if one language has a rich case system, it may help a child see an impoverished case system in another grammar. Examples from prepositional systems, wh-movement, recursive possessives and others are discussed. In general, a second language can be beneficial to the SLI child in the acquisition of both languages. Minimalism offers a level of abstraction where these cross-language connections can most naturally be stated.

There is growing evidence that the orthographic forms (spellings) of second language words affect second language (L2) speech production, but it is not known whether orthography affects L2 phonology in native users of a non-alphabetic writing system. To answer this question, this study tested the effects of number of letters on the duration of consonants and vowels in the EnglishL2 speech production of Japanese–English sequential bilinguals. JapaneseL1–EnglishL2 bilinguals and English native speakers (both n = 16) performed a delayed word repetition task, producing 16 English word pairs in which the same consonant or vowel was spelled either with a single letter or with double letters, as in city-kitty. The bilinguals produced the same English sound as longer or shorter depending on the number of letters in its spelling, confirming that L2 orthographic forms affect L2 speakers’ phonological representations of L2 words even when their L1 writing system is not alphabetical.