Using the visual world paradigm, we compared first, L1 and L2 speakers’ anticipation of upcoming information in a discourse and second, L1 and L2 speakers’ ability to infer the meaning of unknown words in a discourse based on the semantic cues provided in spoken language context. It was found that native speakers were able to use the given contextual cues, throughout the discourse, to anticipate upcoming linguistic input and fixate targets consistent with the input thus far, while L2 speakers showed weaker effects of discourse context on target fixations. However, both native speakers and L2 learners alike were able to use contextual information to infer the meaning of unknown words embedded in the discourse and fixate images associated with the inferred meanings of these words, especially given adequate contextual information. We suggest that these results reflect similarly successful integration of the preceding semantic information and the construction of integrated mental representations of the described scenarios in L1 and L2.

A claim fundamental to the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) was that concepts did not mediate backward translation, based on their findings of a category interference effect in forward translation in relatively fluent bilinguals but no category effect in backward translation. This study hypothesized that there was a category facilitation effect in L2-to-concept, which counterbalanced the category interference effect in concept-to-L1, resulting in an overall L2-to-L1 null category effect.

In a novel English word-pair semantic comparison task, participants were presented with a sequence of English word-pairs, and judged which word's real-world referent was bigger in size. Results found a significant category facilitation effect in both L2-to-concept for young Chinese adults and L1-to-concept for young English adults when increasing the number of trials. The findings help explain why Kroll and Stewart's finding of an overall L2-to-L1 null category effect cannot be evidence against concept mediation in backward translation.

We investigated how individual differences in language proficiency and executive control impact cross-language meaning activation through phonology. Ninety-six university students read English sentences that contained French target words. Target words were high- and low-frequency French interlingual homophones (i.e., words that share pronunciation, but not meaning across langauges; mot means ‘word’ in French and sounds like ‘mow’ in English) and matched French control words (e.g., mois – ‘month’ in French). Readers could use the homophones’ shared phonology to activate their English meanings and, ultimately, make sense of the sentence (e.g., Tony was too lazy to mot/mois the grass on Sunday). Shorter reading times were observed on interlingual homophones than control words, suggesting that phonological representations in one language activate cross-language semantic representations. Importantly, the magnitude of the effect was modulated by word frequency, and several participant-level characteristics, including French proficiency, English word knowledge, and executive control ability.

This paper reports three studies of bilingual lexical processing, using the semantic competitor priming (SCP) method of Lee and Williams (2001). Study 1 found a trend of within-language SCP effect for Chinese–English bilinguals with both higher and lower levels of vocabulary knowledge. There was also a cross-language SCP effect, but this was restricted to bilinguals with a lower level of vocabulary knowledge. Study 2 found a cross-language SCP effect for Chinese learners of English in the classroom context. Study 3 found both within- and cross-language SCP effects for bilinguals with study-abroad experience as well as Chinese–English classroom learners who had a higher working memory capacity. Those findings are interpreted in terms of a dynamic view of bilingual language selection.

Interpreters are hypothesized to anticipate the source language (SL) in comprehension and the target language (TL) in production to facilitate timely delivery. In two experiments, we examined whether interpreters make more predictions in SL comprehension in consecutive interpreting than in regular language comprehension and whether such enhanced prediction (if any) is constrained by cognitive resources. Participants were quicker at reading a predictable versus unpredictable critical word and/or following words (e.g., Without the sunglasses/hat, the sun will hurt your eyes on the beach, where eyes is the critical word), and the prediction effect was larger when they read to later interpret (into Chinese) than to later recall. The enhanced prediction in reading to interpret disappeared when the cognitive load was high, suggesting that SL prediction in interpreting requires cognitive resources. Our findings suggest that, when cognitive resources allow, interpreters engage in enhanced linguistic prediction in SL comprehension to facilitate the delivery of interpreting.

First-language research suggests that new words, after initial episodic-memory encoding, are consolidated and hence become lexically integrated. We asked here if lexical consolidation, about word forms and meanings, occurs in a second language. Italian–English sequential bilinguals learned novel English-like words (e.g., apricon, taught to mean “stapler”). fMRI analyses failed to reveal a predicted shift, after consolidation time, from hippocampal to temporal neocortical activity. In a pause-detection task, responses to existing phonological competitors of learned words (e.g., apricot for apricon) were slowed down if the words had been learned two days earlier (i.e., after consolidation time) but not if they had been learned the same day. In a lexical-decision task, new words primed responses to semantically-related existing words (e.g., apricon-paper) whether the words were learned that day or two days earlier. Consolidation appears to support integration of words into the bilingual lexicon, possibly more rapidly for meanings than for forms.

The study examined whether false-cognates, overlapping in form but not meaning across languages, are easier to learn due to form overlap, or more difficult to learn due to meaning competition, compared to unambiguous control and cognate words. Fifty-four native Hebrew speakers learned 14 cognates, 14 false-cognates, and 28 control Arabic words in one session. Cognates were learned better than control items. There was no overall difference in learning false-cognates relative to controls, but individuals with higher phonological short-term memory, or with lower L1 verbal fluency, did exhibit a false-cognate learning-advantage. For these individuals, form overlap was more influential than meaning competition. Lexical decisions to Hebrew words following Arabic learning were slower for false-cognates than controls, indicative of backward influences. The findings reveal the influence of prior knowledge on learning and processing, and highlight the importance of jointly considering item-based and learner-based characteristics during the initial stages of vocabulary learning.

I would like to begin by thanking the editors of the journal, and in particular Carmen Silva-Corvalán, for inviting such a wonderful group of commentators, united in their commitment to spirited yet courteous academic debate and diverse in their academic allegiances, theories, and methodologies. I also thank the commentators for the kindness and generosity of their comments, which offered rich material for reflection. Reading the comments for the first time, I became concerned that a coherent response that addresses the Emotion Stroop Effect in the same breath as the textual explorations of the “third space” may be all but impossible. I thought about the resemblance between the academic enterprise and the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism, with academic paradigms establishing their own regimes of truth and creating languages that are often mutually incomprehensible. For some, true answers can only come from quantifiable empirical data, others look for veracity in texts and personal testimonies. Some take for granted that “monolingual controls” are a necessary component of solid research on bilingualism, while others doubt the meaningfulness of such a comparison, reminding us that languages are artificial constructions (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and questioning the very existence of crosslinguistic influence (Hall, Cheng and Carlson, 2006). And so we proceed with our parallel lines of research inspired by similar questions about the human condition and yet carried out in ways so distinct as to be incompatible.

The study of bilingualism has generated great interest about a core issue: does the experience of using two or more languages lead to enduring changes in the bilingual brain. This issue is often framed as a search for bilingual advantages in cognition, most notably behavioral performance on executive control tasks. Valian's timely keynote (2014) adopts this framing.

We investigated whether bilingual language experience over the lifespan impacts women and men in a manner that differentially buffers against age-related declines in executive control. To this end, we investigated whether executive control performance in a lifespan sample of adult women and men were differentially impacted by individual differences in bilingual language experience, assessed using an unspeeded measure of executive control: the Wisconsin Card Sort Test. The results suggested that women showed both the greatest degree of age-related decline across WCST measures, and a greater likelihood than men to express improved performance as a function of increased bilingual experience. We consider implications of this finding for advancing our understanding of the relation between bilingualism and cognition, and also the effects of biological sex on cognitive aging.

Emmorey, Giezen and Gollan (Emmorey, Giezen & Gollan) address the fascinating question of what can be learnt about language, cognition and the brain from the unique group of people who have grown up learning both a signed and a spoken language. The focus of their review is hearing individuals – referred to as hearing bimodal bilinguals. The review presents an excellent overview of research in this field and highlights the unique insights that this population can provide.

In their keynote article, Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, De Korte & Rekke (2018) propose a new model that aims to integrate and take care of the possible shortcomings of both the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994) and Bilingual Interactive Activation model (BIA and several of its later versions, Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998). They begin their proposal by examining the objections/issues raised by Brysbaert and Duyck (2010) on RHM. It is well known that RHM is a developmental, production-based model which mostly predicted performance on translation-based tasks albeit with different predictions for translation recognition vs. production with regard to second language proficiency; BIA being a connectionist model of bilingual word recognition majorly emphasized on language non –selective selection and parallel language activation. Having been developed in and around Dutch (English as the second language), it took cognate status and orthographic similarity between words very seriously. Cognate status and orthographic similarity as factors won't count much as theoretical constructs around which a hypothesis could be developed if we look round the diverse types of orthographies and phonologies we find around the world.

The purpose of the current report is to study the effects of language distance on noun and verb processing in bilingual speakers. We recruited two groups of bilingual speakers: one group spoke two typologically distant languages (Cantonese and English) and the other group spoke two typologically similar languages (Mandarin and Cantonese). Participants named object and action pictures in their first language. We controlled psycholinguistic properties of words such as frequency, AoA, imageability, name agreement, visual complexity, familiarity, and participants’ bilingual language experiences. Our findings revealed a significant role for language distance. We observed a difference between noun and verb processing in the similar language pair (Mandarin–Cantonese) due to interference induced by language similarity. However, in the distant language pair (Cantonese–English), the difference disappeared because of the lack of cross-language interference. Our findings support that current and future models of bilingual language processing should take into account the effects of language distance.

An episodic memory experiment was conducted to examine whether “conceptual metaphors” influence how metaphorical expressions are processed and encoded into memory. Forty Chinese–English bilinguals read lists of expressions in their L1 and L2. The data revealed that after reading a series of metaphorical expressions based on the same underlying conceptual metaphor, participants falsely recognized new sentences that instantiated the same conceptual metaphor mapping more often than control sentences that did not share this mapping. This false memory effect was robust in both participants’ L1 and L2, with the only difference between languages being that participants showed more memory errors for literal sentences related to the source domain of the conceptual metaphors when reading in their second language (i.e., English). These data suggest that although bilinguals can access the appropriate conceptual metaphors in their second language, they have difficulty inhibiting literal meaning when processing metaphorical statements.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have impairments in their language-learning abilities that may influence interactions with environmental opportunities to learn two languages. This study explores relationships between proficiency in L1 and L2 and a set of environmental and personal variables within a group of school-age Spanish–English bilingual children with DLD and a group of typically-developing peers. Within each group, current usage in the home, length of L2 exposure, gender, maternal education, analytical reasoning, and number of L1 conversational partners were used to predict proficiency in each language. Results showed that home language environment, particularly home L2 usage, strongly predicted L1 proficiency but had less influence on the L2. Female gender predicted L1 skills in both groups, whereas analytical reasoning predicted both L1 and L2 but only for children with DLD. This study expands the limited literature on how children with DLD interact with their environment to learn two languages.

This longitudinal study examined the influence of child-specific and environmental factors on the development of English receptive vocabulary and grammar by two groups of Danish children: Early Starters (ES) and Late Starters (LS). Age of onset, gender, language aptitude and SES significantly predicted both outcome measures. English competence beliefs (ECB) were positively related to L2 proficiency but only for children with low foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), suggesting a dynamic relationship between ECB and FLCA. Extramural audiovisual viewing and reading played a differential role for ES vs. LS whereas extramural English speaking significantly interacted with gender. Finally, child-specific factors explained more of the variance in English proficiency than environmental factors. This finding, which contradicts results obtained in instructed settings (e.g., Sun, Steinkrauss, Tendeiro & de Bot, 2016) but parallels those in naturalistic settings (e.g., Paradis, 2011), supports the special status of English in countries with a high degree of informal contact with English.

In a 1997, Noam Chomsky offered this informal observation about language acquisition: “Like other kinds of growth, language acquisition happens easily at a certain age, but not later. There comes a time when the system doesn't work anymore. There are individual differences [. . .] but for most people, after adolescence, it becomes very hard. The system is just not working for some reason, so, you have to teach the language as something strange.” (Chomsky, 1997, p. 128)

Past studies have reported memory differences between monolingual and bilingual infants (Brito & Barr, 2012; Singh, Fu, Rahman, Hameed, Sanmugam, Agarwal, Jiang, Chong, Meaney & Rifkin-Graboi, 2015). A common critique within the bilingualism literature is the absence of socioeconomic indicators and/or a lack of socioeconomic diversity among participants. Previous research has demonstrated robust bilingual differences in memory generalization from 6- to 24-months of age. The goal of the current study was to examine if these findings would replicate in a sample of 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual infants from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds (N = 92). Results indicate no differences between language groups on working memory or cued recall, but significant differences for memory generalization, with bilingual infants outperforming monolingual infants regardless of socioeconomic status (SES). These findings replicate and extend results from past studies (Brito & Barr, 2012; Brito, Sebastián-Gallés & Barr, 2015) and suggest possible differential learning patterns dependent on linguistic experience.

To better explain various neurocognitive consequences of bilingualism, recent investigations have adopted continuous measures of bilingual experience, as opposed to binary bi/monolingual distinctions. However, few studies have considered whether bilingualism's effects on cognition are modulated by the linguistic distance (LD) between L1 and L2, and none of the existing studies has examined cognitive consequences of LD in aging populations. Here, we investigated the modulatory role of LD on the relationship between bilingualism, executive performance, and cognitive reserve (CR) in a sample of senior bilinguals. Our results show a dynamic trajectory of LD effects, with more distant language pairs exerting maximum effects at initial stages of bilingual experience – and closer language pairs at advanced stages. Bilingualism-related CR effects emerged only in the individuals with closer language pairs, suggesting that the language control stage of bilingual experience may play a key role in CR accrual, as compared to the L2 learning stage.

The keynote article by Mayberry and Kluender (2017) clearly shows that there are important effects of delayed exposure to a first language (L1), in linguistic comprehension, production, processing, and even in the brain areas that are active for language. This set of findings is of great importance for both theoretical and practical reasons. As Mayberry and Kluender show, one implication of such findings bears on the theory that a critical period for language (CPL) leads to changes in the ways that language develops when accessible exposure is delayed.