We report a study that investigated executive functions in four groups of participants that varied in bilingual language experience, using a task that measured two theoretically motivated mechanisms of cognitive control (proactive and reactive control). Analyses of accuracy based on aggregated measures suggested an advantage in early highly proficient bilinguals over late passive bilinguals. However, when we factored in individual variability using mixed-model regression with a full random effect structure, we only found a marginal effect of language experience. Our results emphasise the importance of including individual variability when studying bilingualism, and highlight a fundamental consideration in research on the relation between language and attention – namely, the need for a theory-driven approach to measuring cognitive control through laboratory tasks.

Pavlenko's keynote paper calls for a rethinking of models of the mental lexicon in the light of recent research into emotion and bilingualism. The author makes a convincing case for the inclusion of affective aspects in the study of the mental lexicon. Indeed, the knowledge of the degree of emotionality of a word and of its affective valence is just as important as the knowledge of that word's grammatical class, or its gender. From a pragmatic point of view, one could argue that an L2 user's inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the emotionality and valence of an emotion word, or an emotion-laden word, in the L2 might lead to unwanted illocutionary effects, which might be far more embarrassing than phonological, morphological or syntactical errors.

This special issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition is devoted to syntactic aspects of bilingual acquisition. For the purposes of this issue, bilingual acquisition is defined as the acquisition of two languages during the period of primary language development, extending from birth onward. Bilingual acquisition can entail the acquisition of more than two languages (see Cenoz and Jessner, 2000) as well as the acquisition of a spoken and signed language (e.g., Richmond-Welty and Siple, 1999) or of two spoken languages; only studies of the simultaneous acquisition of two spoken languages are reported in this volume. An ideal definition of bilingual acquisition would include not only reference to the age of first exposure to two languages, but also reference to the regularity and extent of exposure to each language. While such stipulations are not necessary in defining the context for monolingual acquisition since virtually all children receive sufficient language exposure to fully acquire one language, they are important considerations in cases of bilingual acquisition since some children have insufficient exposure to two languages, either in terms of amount or continuity, to attain full bilingual proficiency.

This study reports a production experiment investigating the realization of objects with different verb types in controlled discourse contexts in 68 three- to seven-year-old sequential Cantonese–English bilingual children. The results show the bilingual children behaved similarly to the Cantonese monolingual peers in object omission, but exhibited protracted development and produced target-deviant forms following a Cantonese pattern in omitting objects specified in prior discourse in English. The bilingual children also showed non-target-like uses of the Cantonese post-verbal object pronoun keoi5, which were unattested in monolingual children. Our findings show evidence for bidirectional cross-linguistic influence: the direction of influence goes from the weaker to the stronger language and from the stronger to the weaker language. Vulnerability of object realization in bilingual acquisition can be better understood in terms of the interaction between cross-linguistic influence, input (e.g., quantity and structural frequencies) and other linguistic elements involved in the interface relation (e.g., verb type).

A longstanding question in the second language acquisition literature is whether late second language (L2) learners process grammatical structures in a native-like manner. Here, we use Time Frequency Representation (TFR) analysis to test morpho-syntactic processing of clitic pronouns in native and late L2 learners of Spanish. The TFR results show overall similar power decreases in theta, alpha, and beta frequencies in both groups. Critically, the observed oscillatory effects persisted in time for native Spanish speakers, but declined earlier for L2 learners. We discuss the results using cell-assembly theory models for language processing (e.g., Pulvermüller, 1999) that posit a biphasic time-course for neural assemblies consisting of an early ignition (recognition) and a later reverberation (re-processing) phase. We propose a working hypothesis for L2 processing in tune with a cell-assembly theory suggesting that the length of the reverberation phase could be a distinguishing feature between native and L2 processing.

Babcok et al. (2012) claim that Paradis (1994, 2004, 2009) argues that the reliance of late L2 learners on L1 neurocognitive mechanisms increases over time across both lexical and grammatical functions, namely for lexical items as well as rule-governed grammatical procedures, when in fact one can find repeated statements to the contrary in the very publications cited by the authors. Actually, Paradis’ main contention over the past 20 years has been that, contrary to grammatical functions, lexical items (as meaning–form relationships) are always of the same nature in L1 and L2 (hence stored declaratively). Thus in L2, only the neurocognitive mechanisms on which aspects of the grammar depend change over time. Consequently, the finding that length of residence (like age of arrival) influences the mechanisms underlying regular (composed), but not irregular (stored) verb forms, is compatible with Paradis’ views, in contradiction to what Babcock et al. are also suggesting.

While Hulk and Müller (2000) predict that the direction of cross-linguistic syntactic influence is unidirectional when the construction involves syntax–pragmatics interface and surface overlap between two languages, they explicitly rule out language dominance as a factor involved. This study questions their latter claim and argues that the syntax of the dominant language can influence that of the weaker, based on a Korean–English bilingual boy's attriting English data; Korean null subjects triggered English subject drop when his Korean became more dominant. Thus, I propose a revised model of cross-linguistic influence that accounts for both Hulk and Müller's proposal and my data.

The present study asked whether or not the apparent insensitivity of second language (L2) learners to grammatical gender violations reflects an inability to use grammatical information during L2 lexical processing. Native German speakers and English speakers with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency in German performed a translation-recognition task. On critical trials, an incorrect translation was presented that either matched or mismatched the grammatical gender of the correct translation. Results show interference for native German speakers in conditions in which the incorrect translation matched the gender of the correct translation. Native English speakers, regardless of German proficiency, were insensitive to the gender mismatch. In contrast, these same participants were correctly able to assign gender to critical items. These findings suggest a dissociation between explicit knowledge and the ability to use that information under speeded processing conditions and demonstrate the difficulty of L2 gender processing at the lexical level.

Grammatical processing in a second language (L2) that is learned in adulthood has been shown to differ from processing in a first/native language (L1). Clahsen and Felser's (2006) landmark article provided the first comprehensive account of these differences. According to their shallow structure hypothesis (SSH), L2 learners, unlike L1 speakers, do not compute abstract, hierarchical representations during online sentence comprehension; instead, they rely on lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information to build ‘good enough’ representations. However, native-like processing is attainable – with sufficient L2 proficiency – for word-level processing and morphosyntactic feature processing between locally related words. Clahsen and Felser's article spurred a prolific volume of research over the last decade. Some findings support the SSH, whereas others favor the competing claim that L1/L2 differences result from capacity-based limitations.

Studies examining the potential effects of bilingualism on interference suppression show inconsistent results. Our study approaches this topic by distinguishing two potential subcomponents within interference suppression (i.e., Stimulus-Stimulus and Stimulus-Response conflict). We investigated the two subcomponents through their operationalisation in different tasks and examined the role of language proficiency in modulating it. A sample of 111 young adult participants performed four non-linguistic cognitive tasks measuring both visual and auditory domains of cognitive control. Bilinguals outperformed monolinguals in tasks involving Stimulus-Stimulus conflict, but showed comparable performance in tasks involving Stimulus-Response conflict. Specific effects of language proficiency on cognitive control were observed: group differences in auditory inhibition and visual orienting were only observed between high-proficient bilinguals and monolinguals. Taken together, types of conflicts involved in interference tasks and language proficiency could differentially affect performance in monolinguals and bilinguals.

We examined the association between bilingualism, executive function (EF), and brain volume in older monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke English, Spanish, or both, and were cognitively normal (CN) or diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) or dementia. Gray matter volume (GMV) was higher in language and EF brain regions among bilinguals, but no differences were found in memory regions. Neuropsychological performance did not vary across language groups over time; however, bilinguals exhibited reduced Stroop interference and lower scores on Digit Span Backwards and category fluency. Higher scores on Digit Span Backwards were associated with a younger age of English acquisition, and a greater degree of balanced bilingualism was associated with lower scores in category fluency. The initial age of cognitive decline did not differ between language groups. The influence of bilingualism appears to be reflected in increased GMV in language and EF regions, and to a lesser degree, in EF.

This study extends research on morphological processing in late bilinguals to a rarely examined language type, Semitic, by reporting results from a masked-priming experiment with 58 non-native, advanced, second-language (L2) speakers of Hebrew in comparison with native (L1) speakers. We took advantage of a case of ‘pure morphology’ in Hebrew, the so-called binyanim, which represent (essentially arbitrary) morphological classes for verbs. Our results revealed a non-native priming pattern for the L2 group, with root-priming effects restricted to non-finite prime words irrespective of binyanim type. We conclude that root extraction in L2 Hebrew word recognition is less sensitive to both morphological and morphosyntactic cues than in the L1, in line with the Shallow-Structure Hypothesis of L2 processing.

Although bilinguals benefit from semantic context while perceiving speech-in-noise in their native language (L1), the extent to which bilinguals benefit from semantic context in their second language (L2) is unclear. Here, 57 highly proficient English–French/French–English bilinguals, who varied in L2 age of acquisition, performed a speech-perception-in-noise task in both languages while event-related brain potentials were recorded. Participants listened to and repeated the final word of sentences high or low in semantic constraint, in quiet and with a multi-talker babble mask. Overall, our findings indicate that bilinguals do benefit from semantic context while perceiving speech-in-noise in both their languages. Simultaneous bilinguals showed evidence of processing semantic context similarly to monolinguals. Early sequential bilinguals recruited additional neural resources, suggesting more effective use of semantic context in L2, compared to late bilinguals. Semantic context use was not associated with bilingual language experience or working memory.

The schema concept has had a long and varied history in psychology. It was introduced by Bartlett (1932), who observed that subjects' reproductions of a story showed systematic deviations from the original. Elements in the original story that were uncommon or strange were lost or changed and elaborated such that they became more common and made more sense to the subjects, and infrequent words and concepts were replaced by more common ones. Bartlett explained this normalization behavior by assuming that humans adapt incoming information to existing knowledge structures in long-term memory and that they understand new information in terms of these structures. These knowledge structures were called schemas. Schemas may represent our knowledge of stereotypical events such as doing the laundry or cooking a meal (these schema structures are usually called scripts, Schank & Abelson, 1977), of objects and natural categories (see Anderson, 1985, for a discussion), and the knowledge underlying routine behavior (Norman, 1981). They provide a basis for explaining many different phenomena of information processing and memory functioning, such as inferencing, elaborating, stereotyping, reconstruction, false memorization, and the occurrence of slips in task performance. When, for instance, a reader encounters the word forest in a text, he is not surprised to see the noun phrase the trees, with the definite article, in the next sentence even though no trees were explicitly introduced before.

The finding that noun production is slower and less accurate in bilinguals compared to monolinguals is well replicated, but not well understood. This study examined the two prominent theoretical accounts for this bilingual effect: weaker links and cross-language interference. Highly proficient Mandarin–English bilinguals and English-speaking monolinguals named pictures in which the effects of grammatical class, word frequency and translatability were examined. While bilinguals were slower overall than monolinguals in both L1 and L2, the magnitude of this bilingual effect was smaller for verbs than for nouns. Bilinguals showed a larger production advantage for high vs. low frequency words in their L2 relative to monolinguals and their L1. Bilinguals also showed an advantage for words with greater translatability, which did not differ across grammatical categories. The findings lend partial support to the weaker links account, and reveal cross-language facilitation rather than interference.

Central questions in psycholinguistic studies on bilingualism are how bilinguals access words in their two languages, and how they control their language systems and solve the problem of cross-language competition. In their excellent paper “The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision”, Dijkstra and Van Heuven expound their BIA+ model on bilingual word recognition. BIA+ builds on its predecessor BIA, one of the first connectionist models on bilingual word recognition. BIA+ preserves one of BIA's crucial assumptions, namely that the bilingual lexicon is integrated across languages and is accessed in a language non-selective way, an assumption that is supported in many empirical studies and that is now widely accepted in the bilingual literature. Compared to the original BIA model, the BIA+ architecture is further developed (in fact, much more so than the subtle ‘plus’ denotes). BIA+ now includes orthographic, as well as phonological and semantic representations in the word identification system, and a distinction is made between a word identification system and a task/decision system. This latter extension resembles the language task schemas in Green's (1998) Inhibitory Control model. Dijkstra and Van Heuven also distinguish between effects of linguistic and non-linguistic context on performance: linguistic context effects, that arise from lexical, syntactic and semantic sources, are assumed to affect the activity in the word identification system, whereas non-linguistic effects, that can arise from instruction, task demands or participant expectancies, are assumed to affect the task/decision system.

Much bilingualism research includes some consideration of codeswitching, which may be measured via self-report, an experimental task, or sociolinguistic interview; however, there is little triangulation across measures in either psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic approaches. To consider possible differences between self-report and oral production of codeswitching, Spanish–English bilinguals completed a codeswitching questionnaire and oral production in an autobiographical memory task. They also completed proficiency and executive function tests. We found that broad measures of self-reported and orally produced codeswitches were positively correlated, although relationships with proficiency and executive function were more complex. These findings may direct future studies’ operationalization of codeswitching.

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of bilingual patients with aphasia have contributed to our understanding of how the brain processes different languages. The question we asked is whether differences in script have any impact on language processing in bilingual aphasic patients who speak languages with different writing systems: Chinese and Mongolian. We observed a pattern of greater impairment to written word comprehension and oral reading in L2 (Chinese) than in L1 (Mongolian) for two patients. We argue that differences in script have only a minimal effect on written word processing in bilingual aphasia when the age of acquisition, word frequency and imageability of lexical items is controlled. Our conclusion is that reading of familiar words in Mongolian and Chinese might not require independent cognitive systems or brain regions.