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.

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.

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.

Extending the paradigm in L1 acquisition, scholars have begun to investigate whether participants’ domain-general ability to represent, encode, and integrate spectral and temporal dimensions of sounds (i.e., auditory processing) could be a potential determinant of the outcomes of post-pubertal L2 speech learning. The current study set out to test the hypothesis that auditory processing makes a unique contribution to L2 speech acquisition, for 70 Japanese classroom learners of English with different levels of L2 proficiency when biographical backgrounds (length of instruction and immersion) and memory abilities (working, declarative, and procedural memory) are controlled for. Auditory processing loaded onto modality-general capacities to represent and incorporate anchor stimuli (relative to target stimuli) into long-term memory in an implicit fashion, but dissociated from explicit abilities to remember, associate, and elaborate sensory information. Auditory processing explained a small-to-medium amount of variance in L2 speech learning, even after the other potentially confounding variables were statistically factored out.

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.

We examined the influence of bilingualism on task switching by inspecting various markers for task-switching costs. English monolinguals and Korean–English bilinguals completed a modified Dimensional Change Card Sort task based on a nonverbal task-switching paradigm. We found advantages for Korean–English bilinguals in terms of smaller single-task (pure-block) switch costs and greater reactivation benefits than those of English monolinguals. However, bilingual advantages in mixing costs were relatively weak, and the two groups did not differ on local switch costs. Notably, when we approximated the cue-based priming effect in single-task (pure) blocks, we found no evidence that the locus of bilingual advantages in task-switching performance is attributable to a basic cue-priming effect. Taken together, our results suggest that bilingualism is conducive to task switching via facilitation in control processing, including inhibition of proactive interferences and efficient adaptation to abstract task-set reactivation.

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.

Very little is known about the processes underlying second language (L2) speakers’ understanding of written metaphors and similes. Moreover, most of the theories on figurative language comprehension do not consider reader-related factors. In the study, we used eye-tracking to examine how native Finnish speakers (N = 63) read written English nominal metaphors (“education is a stairway”) and similes (“education is like a stairway”). Identical topic–vehicle pairs were used in both conditions. After reading, participants evaluated familiarity of each pair. English proficiency was measured using the Bilingual-language Profile Questionnaire and the Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English. The results showed that readers were more likely to regress within metaphors than within similes, indicating that processing metaphors requires more processing effort than processing similes. The familiarity of a metaphor and L2 English proficiency modulated this effect. The results are discussed in the light of current theories on figurative language processing.

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)

It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals’ susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals’ judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures.

Bilingual first language acquisition (BFLA) has been considered a possible mechanism of contact-induced change in several recent studies (Siegel, 2008, p. 117; Satterfield, 2005, p. 2075; Thomason, 2001, p. 148; Yip & Matthews, 2007, p.15). There is as yet little consensus on the question, with divergent views regarding both BFLA at the individual level and the implications for language change at the community level.

Mayberry and Kluender (Mayberry & Kluender) adopt interesting positions on a wide range of issues. Due to space limitations, we will focus on just two where our views differ: (i) the robustness of maturational constraints on second language acquisition (L2A), and (ii) the implications of a role for language aptitudes within the boundaries defined by sensitive periods (SPs).

The main fact that is currently known about the nature of masked L2-L1 noncognate translation priming effects in the lexical decision task is simply that those effects are significant in some studies but not in others. In an effort to better understand these effects, we examined the data pattern for very proficient Japanese–English bilinguals using RT distributional analyses. We also examined the impacts of prime and target frequency on the priming effect. Significant priming was present even on the fastest trials, becoming larger on slower trials. Nonetheless, priming effects were generally constant across prime and target frequency with the only exception being when very high frequency L2 primes were used. In that situation, priming and target frequency were negatively related, a result that essentially produced the observed pattern of increasing priming on slower trials. Implications of these results and potential reasons for the presence/absence of L2-L1 priming effects are discussed.

Inspired by information theoretic analyses of L1 speech and language, this study proposes that L1 and L2 speech exhibit distinct information encoding and transmission profiles in the temporal domain. Both the number and average duration of acoustic syllables (i.e., intensity peaks in the temporal envelope) were automatically measured from L1 and L2 recordings of standard texts in English, French, and Spanish. Across languages, L2 acoustic syllables were greater in number (more acoustic syllables/text) and longer in duration (fewer acoustic syllables/second). While substantial syllable reduction (fewer acoustic than orthographic syllables) was evident in both L1 and L2 speech, L2 speech generally exhibited less syllable reduction, resulting in low information density (more syllables with less information/syllable). Low L2 information density compounded low L2 speech rate yielding very low L2 information transmission rate (i.e., less information/second). Overall, this cross-language comparison establishes low information transmission rate as a language-general, distinguishing feature of L2 speech.

Cunnings (2016) proposes that differences between native (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing can best be explained in terms of susceptibility to effects of interference and an overreliance on discourse level cues during memory retrieval. Cunnings’ argument that difficulty in retrieval operations may provide a better explanation than a syntactic deficit account for explaining certain L1-L2 differences is convincing. However, the proposal for the ‘overuse’ of discourse is too broad and needs to be refined in terms of the specific contexts and conditions under which learners have difficulty. We also believe that difficulty with cue-based retrieval is still a characterization of the symptoms of differences between L1-L2 processing, and does not necessarily address the source of the variability.

Among bilinguals, language-related variables such as first and second language proficiency and balance may be related to important cognitive and academic outcomes, but approaches to characterizing these variables are inconsistent, particularly among at-risk samples of children. The current study employed comprehensive language assessment of English and Spanish language skills and contrasted various approaches to the characterization of language among at-risk ELs in middle school (N = 161). Specifically, we contrasted variable-centered and person-centered approaches, and convergence between objective and self-report measures. Findings support a two-factor structure of English and Spanish language skills in this population, three profiles of students (balanced, moderately unbalanced-higher Spanish, and very unbalanced-higher English), convergence between variable-centered and person-centered approaches, and mixed support for subjective indices of usage. Results provide a foundation from which to examine the roles of L1 and L2 proficiency as well as balance in important cognitive and academic outcomes in this at-risk and understudied population.

Spanish–English bilinguals switched between naming pictures in one language and either reading-aloud or semantically classifying written words in both languages. When switching between reading-aloud and picture-naming, bilinguals exhibited no language switch costs in picture-naming even though they produced overt language switches in speech. However, when switching between semantic classification and picture-naming, bilinguals, especially unbalanced bilinguals, exhibited switch costs in the dominant language and switch facilitation in the nondominant language even though they never switched languages overtly. These results reveal language switching across comprehension and production can be cost-free when the intention remains the same. Assuming switch costs at least partially reflect inhibition of the nontarget language, this implies such language control mechanisms are recruited only under demanding task conditions, especially for unbalanced bilinguals. These results provide striking demonstration of adaptive control mechanisms and call into question previous claims that language switch costs necessarily transfer from comprehension to production.