Research examining the cognitive consequences of bilingualism has increasingly relied on continuous measures to capture the degree and nature of bilingual experience, using such variables as proficiency, age of acquisition, and language environments. One such measure, language entropy, indexes the social diversity of contexts in which each language is used. The construct was developed in a particular bilingual context, Montréal, Canada. The present study investigated the extent to which it also applies to a context in which social language use is substantially different from that of Montréal – namely, Toronto, Canada. Following the procedures in the original study, participants were assigned an entropy score and performed the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT). Performance was associated with self-rated language proficiency, but unlike the results from Montréal, was not associated with entropy scores. Therefore, differences in the language context influence whether language entropy is related to behavioral performance on a cognitive task.

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between the working memory skills of sign language interpreters and the quality of their interpretations. In Experiment 1, we found that scores on 3-back tasks with signs and words were not related to the quality of interpreted narratives. In Experiment 2, we found that memory span scores for words and signs under oral articulatory suppression were related to the quality of interpreted narratives. We argue that the insensitivity to articulatory suppression in memory span tasks reflects the interpreters' ability to bind information from multiple sources in episodic memory. This enhanced ability leads to less reliance on the retention of information from the source language in memory during interpreting, and will positively affect the quality of interpretations (Padilla, Bajo & Macizo, 2005). Finally, in contrast to previous studies on the memory spans for signs and words (Hall & Bavelier, 2010), we found that the memory spans scores for spoken words and signs were equally large. We argue that the use of a large set of phonologically complex stimuli in the present study may have stimulated participants to use a speech-based code to store and retain the signs in short-term memory.

Native speakers use suprasegmental information to predict words, but less is known about segmental information. Moreover, anticipatory studies with non-native speakers are scarce and mix proficiency with anticipatory experience. To address these limitations, we investigated whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced English learners of Spanish use suprasegmentals (stress: oxytone, paroxytone) and segmentals (syllabic structure: CVC, CV) to predict word suffixes, and whether increased anticipatory experience acquired via interpreting will facilitate anticipation in non-interpreting L2 situations. Eye-tracking data revealed that: (1) the three groups made use of the linguistic variables, and L2 groups did not anticipate in CV paroxytones; (2) everybody anticipated better with the less frequent conditions (oxytones, CVC) having fewer lexical competitors; (3) monolinguals anticipated earlier than L2 learners; and (4) interpreters anticipated at a faster rate in some conditions. These findings indicate that less frequent suprasegmental and segmental information and anticipatory experience facilitate native and non-native spoken word prediction.

This study examined temporal reference marking in texts written by Dutch deaf children and adults who differed in sign language proficiency. The temporal reference marking systems in Dutch and Sign Language of the Netherlands (SLN) differ substantially, with Dutch having a wide range of lexical and morphological markers of temporal reference, and SLN relying on lexical marking of temporal reference. The results showed that the youngest proficient signers had difficulties with tense morphology: they avoided the marked past tense form in narratives and omitted verbs, but showed no problems with lexical marking of temporal reference. In the older proficient signing writers, verb morphology emerged, and in proficient signing adults temporal reference marking resembled that of the hearing adults. This study shows that in order to gain more insight into deaf people's writing, it is important to adopt a bilingual perspective and take variations in sign language proficiency into account.

The diversity of experiences among bilingual children is reflected in the variability of abilities in each of their languages. This paper describes the CECER-DLL Child and Family, and Teacher Questionnaires and discusses the utility of these tools. These questionnaires were created to address the need for valid and reliable tools to document contextual characteristics and language experiences of young bilingual children in developmental and educational research. A multi-site validity study using the CECER-DLL Questionnaires demonstrates how children's language skills are influenced by language exposure at home and at school, mothers’ and teachers’ skills in each language, mother's generational status, and languages used during language and literacy activities at home.

Simultaneous bilingual children sometimes display crosslinguistic influence (CLI), widely attested in the domain of morphosyntax. It remains less clear whether CLI affects bilinguals’ event construal, what motivates its occurrence and directionality, and how developmentally persistent it is. The present study tested predictions generated by the structural overlap hypothesis and the co-activation account in the motion event domain. 96 English–French bilingual children of two age groups and 96 age-matched monolingual English and French controls were asked to describe animated videos displaying voluntary motion events. Semantic encoding in main verbs showed bidirectional CLI. Unidirectional CLI affected French path encoding in the verbal periphery and was predicted by the presence of boundary-crossing, despite the absence of structural overlap. Furthermore, CLI increased developmentally in the French data. It is argued that these findings reflect highly dynamic co-activation patterns sensitive to the requirements of the task and to language-specific challenges in the online production process.

The present study investigated lexical production and innovation of 202 participants across six groups: child and adult heritage speakers of Russian, dominant in Hebrew or American English, and monolingual Russian-speaking children and adults. Understanding quantitative performance across these six groups was intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on heritage language (HL) development, while comparing the participants’ qualitative non-target response patterns would elucidate the organization of the HL lexicon. We assessed the production of Russian nouns and verbs using a naming task. We then considered the effects of input at the societal and lexical levels (focusing on word frequency and age of acquisition). Our findings are discussed in terms of accounts of HL developmental trajectories: monolingual-like trajectory, frozen lexical development, attrition, and new language variety in a contact situation. The results presented no evidence for attrition, while elements of the other three trajectories were found in our quantitative and qualitative analyses.

It is not easy to comment on Dijkstra and Van Heuven's model because there are many more aspects we agree with than aspects we feel uncomfortable about. Indeed, the BIA model has played an enormous role in showing us how bilingual visual word recognition can be achieved without recurrence to the intuitively appealing – but wrong – ideas of separate, language-specific lexicons and language-selective access. As in many other research areas, a working computational model has been much more influential in convincing critical readers (and researchers) than any series of empirical findings. The BIA+ model inherits this strength and, hopefully, in the coming years will be implemented in enough detail to exceed its predecessor. In the rest of this comment, we would like to put a cautionary note behind the temporal delay assumption introduced in the target article and provide some additional corroborating evidence for the lack of non-linguistic effects on early processes in the identification system.

Does reading Pinyin, a Roman alphabet transcription of Chinese, cause the implicit activation of the corresponding Chinese character? To address this question, we carried out two experiments with adult Chinese learners, measuring interference in character reading in a modified Stroop task. Participants first made a meaning judgment on a Pinyin word, and then judged the printed color of a character that was either visually related or unrelated to the character that corresponded to the Pinyin word. A character orthographic interference effect was observed for advanced Chinese learners but not intermediate Chinese learners. The proficiency-dependent emergence of this interference effect suggests its dependence on Chinese character reading experience. For models of Chinese reading, the results demonstrate the role of the character as a gateway to meaning that, through reading experience, comes to be routinely involved in reading for meaning, whether the input is a character or an alphabetic spelling.

The proposal has been made (Zuckerman, 1999, 2001, with various antecedents) that economy of derivation is operative in language acquisition in such a way that whenever movement appears to be optional to the child, s/he chooses the derivation without movement. In this paper we undertake the task of finding evidence for this claim in monolingual and bilingual acquisition. We draw on data available in the literature and on original data from a bilingual English-Dutch child. This child's word order patterns testify to the fact that movement never occurs beyond the target (e.g. there are no V2 embedded clauses in his Dutch productions), and when deviant word orders are attested they result from lack of raising (in particular, lack of verb raising in embedded sentences in English). These patterns are predicted if economy of derivation holds; further, bilingual children, having as input languages with possibly diverging parameter settings, are especially prone to an extended parameter setting period, giving rise to deviant word order patterns, and thus offering insight into the mechanisms of language acquisition.

For several decades now, research on the acquisition of ASL and other signed languages has contributed to our understanding of language acquisition and of age effects in particular. A strong decline in learning capacity with age has been shown in numerous studies with ASL as L1, and the age range for this critical period phenomenon appears to be very similar to what has been observed in even more studies in L2 (for both spoken and signed languages). Mayberry and Kluender (Mayberry & Kluender) argue that the two phenomena are quite different, however, to such an extent that the concept of a critical period is not applicable to L2. Their two main arguments are that L2 learners are less affected by late acquisition than L1 learners and that some L2 studies have not shown the kind of discontinuity in the age-proficiency function that is predicted by the concept of a critical period. As space is very limited, I will limit my comments to these two issues.

We investigated how bilingual speakers process evidentiality information in a dual language activation setting (Green & Abutalebi, 2013) using a translation production and confidence judgment task. Due to interaction of multiple factors in bilingual processing a multifactor model CASP (Complex Adaptive System Principles) for Bilingualism (Filipović & Hawkins, 2019) was used as a theoretical frame. Evidentiality indicates the source of information about past events, i.e., whether they were witnessed firsthand or non-firsthand and it is marked obligatorily in the grammar of Turkish and optionally in English using verbs, adverbs or constructions. The results show that firsthand information is translated more correctly than the non-firsthand in both directions and that different bilingual populations all gravitate towards a shared pattern in both languages but in different ways due to the different proficiency (English vs. Turkish as the stronger (L1) language) and different acquisition histories (early heritage vs. migrant late bilingualism).

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) are involved in conflict detection and conflict resolution, respectively. Here, we investigate how lifelong bilingualism induces neuroplasticity to these structures by employing a novel analysis of behavioural performance. We correlated grey matter volume (GMV) in seniors reported by Abutalebi et al. (2015) with behavioral Flanker task performance fitted using the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978). As predicted, we observed significant correlations between GMV in the DLPFC and Flanker performance. However, for monolinguals the non-decision time parameter was significantly correlated with GMV in the left DLPFC, whereas for bilinguals the correlation was significant in the right DLPFC. We also found a significant correlation between age and GMV in left DLPFC and the non-decision time parameter for the conflict effect for monolinguals only.

We submit that this is due to cumulative demands on cognitive control over a lifetime of bilingual language processing.

We examined how proficiency influences the processing of emotion words in Spanish–English bilinguals (22 balanced and 20 unbalanced). All unbalanced bilinguals were more proficient in English than Spanish. Participants rated the valence of negative, neutral, and positive words in both languages while EEG was being recorded. ERP latencies and amplitudes were analyzed for two components. The language effect was significant on the late positive component (LPC) amplitude, which was larger for emotion than for neutral words for both groups in English. The unbalanced group presented larger LPC amplitudes for positive than for neutral and for neutral than for negative words in Spanish, suggesting emotion processing differences in these participants’ less proficient language. Valence effects were consistent across languages for the balanced group, but not for the unbalanced group, perhaps reflecting differences in reactivity to emotion words in the less proficient language.

Recent studies have revealed remarkable interactions between language and emotion. Here, we show that such interactions influence judgments made regarding cultural information. Balanced Welsh–English bilinguals categorized statements about their native Welsh culture as true or false. Whilst participants categorized positive statements as true when they were true, they were biased towards categorizing them as true also when they were false, irrespective of the language in which they read them. Surprisingly, participants were unbiased when categorizing negative statements presented in their native language Welsh, but showed a reverse bias - categorizing sentences as false, even when they were true - for negative statements when they read them in English. The locus of this behavior originated from online semantic evaluation of the statements, shown in corresponding modulations of the N400 peak of event-related brain potentials. These findings suggest that bilinguals perceive and react to cultural information in a language-dependent fashion.

Research has shown that L1 speakers can routinely generate mental imagery corresponding to sentence meaning in reading comprehension. This may reflect an efficient process of semantic integration in which information from the input combines with an individual's linguistic and real world knowledge to form a semantic representation of a sentence. Semantic integration in L2 reading has received limited attention. The present study attempted to examine the activation of mental imagery in reading among L2 speakers and thus to assess the efficiency of semantic integration during L2 reading. L2 Korean learners were tested on a sentence-based picture recognition task in which they were asked to respond to a picture immediately after reading a sentence related to the picture. Results showed that L2 Korean learners resembled native Korean speakers in their ability to generate mental imageries that reflected subtle semantic differences in sentence input.

The study examined granularity of lexical partitioning of the blue area in speakers of English, which encodes the term blue; Russian, which encodes two terms, sinij [dark/navy blue] and goluboj [light/sky blue]; and Ukrainian, which encodes the terms synij [dark/navy blue] and blakytnyj and golubyj [light/sky blue]. Five groups of participants took part in the study: (1) 30 L1 speakers of English, (2) 30 L1 speakers of Russian, (3) 30 Russian–English bilinguals, (4) 30 English–Russian bilinguals, and (5) 25 Ukrainian–Russian–English trilinguals. Quantitative and qualitative analyses revealed that L1 Russian speakers referred to different types of blue significantly more frequently than all other groups, while bilinguals patterned with L1 English speakers. These findings suggest that classroom exposure to L2 Russian does not make the distinction between sinij and goluboj communicatively relevant for L1 English speakers and that everyday use of L2 English may trigger attrition of the contrast in L1 Russian.

We present an original model designed to study how a second language (L2) is acquired in bilinguals at different proficiencies starting from an existing L1. The model assumes that the conceptual and lexical aspects of languages are stored separately: conceptual aspects in distinct topologically organized Feature Areas, and lexical aspects in a single Lexical Network. Lexical and semantic aspects are then linked together during Hebbian learning phases by presenting L2 lexical items and their L1 translation equivalents. The model hypothesizes the existence of a competitive mechanism to solve conflicts and simulate language switching tasks. Results demonstrate that, at the beginning of training, an L2 lexicon must parasitize its L1 equivalent to access its conceptual meaning. At intermediate proficiency, L2 items may evoke their semantics independently of L1, but with a high risk of interference. At higher proficiency, the L2 representation becomes progressively similar to the L1 representation, according to Green's (2003) convergence hypothesis.

In this rich and provocative article, De Bot, Lowie and Verspoor provide a clear and informative description of the central tenets of dynamic systems theory and apply this to a number of theoretical and empirical issues in second language acquisition. The authors see dynamic systems theory as a promise for the future, an overarching theory in second language acquisition that takes into account the interconnectedness that is so characteristic of complex, developing systems, including the cognitive and social factors that help shape the process of second language acquisition. Having pioneered in dynamic systems for quite some time now (see Van Geert and Steenbeek, 2005, for a recent overview), I cannot be but supportive of their vision and their hope that this particular approach will lead to a fuller understanding of second language acquisition that is not only of theoretical but also of applied importance. However, the authors' remark about “some unresolved issues” in Dynamic Systems Theory may be somewhat over-optimistic. Nevertheless, I consider the dynamic systems approach as the quintessential future approach to human action, cognition and behavior, including language. All these phenomena are about change, about process in time. And this is exactly what dynamic systems approaches provide: an explicit model of change of some phenomenon of interest.

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations that senior Chinese high school students had in L2 differed from the pattern they had in their first language (L1). The results consistently indicated that (i) the participants appeared as aware of taxonomic relations in L2 as they were in L1; and (ii) they were more readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L1 but less readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L2. It was concluded that with taxonomic relations, low-proficiency bilinguals could have a common set of conceptual representations for both L2 and L1, as they are assumed in the revised hierarchical model (RHM) to have. With thematic associations, they might have more difficulty gaining access to their representations in L2 than they might have in L1.