This study examined whether bilinguals automatically activate lexical options from both of their languages when performing a picture matching task in their dominant language (L1) by using event related potentials. English–French bilinguals and English monolinguals performed a picture-spoken word matching task with three conditions: match (BEACH-“beach”), unrelated mismatch (BEACH-“tack”), and L2 onset competitor mismatch (BEACH-“plaid”; plaid sounds like plage, the French word for beach). Critically, bilinguals, but not monolinguals, showed reduced N400s for L2-cohort vs. unrelated mismatches. The results provide clear evidence that when bilinguals identify pictures, they automatically activate lexical options from both languages, even when expecting oral input from only their dominant language. N400 attenuation suggests bilinguals activate but do not expect L2 lexical options.

Ikizer and Ramirez-Esparza (2017) reported a study suggesting that bilingualism may have a positive impact on people's social skills. They found that a) bilinguals scored higher on a scale that is supposed to reveal social flexibility, and that b) they also report having social interactions more frequently than monolinguals. The authors relate this advantage in social flexibility to the need of exercising language switching in bilingual speakers. In this commentary, we argue that their arguments are not theoretically sound and that their observations are not compelling enough to reach this conclusion.

Recent findings demonstrate a bilingual advantage for voice processing in children, but the mechanism supporting this advantage is unknown. Here we examined whether a bilingual advantage for voice processing is observed in adults and, if so, if it reflects enhanced pitch perception or inhibitory control. Voice processing was assessed for monolingual and bilingual adults using an associative learning identification task and a discrimination task in English (a familiar language) and French (an unfamiliar language). Participants also completed pitch perception, flanker, and auditory Stroop tasks. Voice processing was improved for the familiar compared to the unfamiliar language and reflected individual differences in pitch perception (both tasks) and inhibitory control (identification task). However, no bilingual advantage was observed for either voice task, suggesting that the bilingual advantage for voice processing becomes attenuated during maturation, with performance in adulthood reflecting knowledge of linguistic structure in addition to general auditory and inhibitory control abilities.

Dijkstra and van Heuven lucidly summarize the important research generated by the BIA model and provide an excellent case for the BIA+ model with its critical separation of the identification system from the task/decision system. A keynote article necessarily offers a selective exposition of the authors' thinking and so my remarks are an invitation to expand. My first question concerns the scope of the BIA+ model. My remaining questions broadly address a key feature of the BIA+ model – its ability to explain performance changes as a function of task demands

Bilinguals usually select the right language to speak for the particular context they are in, but sometimes the nontarget language intrudes. Despite a large body of research into language selection and language control, it remains unclear where intrusion errors originate from. These errors may be due to incorrect selection of the nontarget language at the conceptual level, or be a consequence of erroneous word selection (despite correct language selection) at the lexical level. We examined the former possibility in two language switching experiments using a manipulation that supposedly affects language selection on the conceptual level, namely whether the conversational language context was associated with the target language (congruent) or with the alternative language (incongruent) on a trial. Both experiments showed that language intrusion errors occurred more often in incongruent than in congruent contexts, providing converging evidence that language selection during concept preparation is one driving force behind language intrusion.

Bimodal bilinguals, the fluent users of a spoken and a signed language, occupy only a small proportion of the bilingual population. However, they provide a unique window into the cognitive and neural structures of language processing. In an article in this issue, Emmorey and colleagues carefully examined the recent empirical evidence from hearing bimodal bilinguals and presented clear and interesting discussion on the implications to our understanding of bilingual language organization and processing (Emmorey, Giezen & Gollan, Emmorey, Giezen & Gollan). Here I would like to add discussion on code-blending and language control in bimodal bilinguals.

Based on a detailed review of existing studies of high-proficiency second-language (L2) learners who acquired the L2 in adolescence/adulthood, Cunnings (Cunnings, 2016) argues that Sorace's (2011) Interface Hypothesis (IH) and Clahsen and Felser's (2006) Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) do not explain the existing data as well as his memory-based approach which posits that memory-retrieval processes in the L1 and L2 do not pattern alike. Cunnings proposes that L1 and L2 processing differ in terms of comprehenders’ ability to retrieve from memory information constructed during sentence processing. He concludes that L2 processing is more susceptible to interference effects during retrieval, and, most relevantly for this commentary, that discourse-based cues to memory retrieval are more heavily weighted in L2 than L1 processing.

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

Polysyllabic shortening is used to maintain stress-timed rhythm in English, but used negligibly in Spanish. It is unknown how polysyllabic shortening is influenced when individuals are exposed to one language that employs it and one that does not. We calculated polysyllabic shortening for 35 functionally monolingual English-speaking adults and 19 relatively balanced Spanish–English bilingual peers who repeated English and Spanish nonwords. Results showed that speech motor patterns learned early in life might be sufficient to block cross-linguistic transfer of polysyllabic shortening despite limited language proficiency, and bilingual speakers appear to signal membership in the majority language by increasing polysyllabic shortening.

This paper investigates the knowledge of constructions with absent expletives by advanced and high-proficiency non-native speakers of German whose first language is Polish. German grammar is known to license null subjects due to the strength of AGRP but not to identify them. Therefore only expletive subjects can be absent in German, except for Topic-drop and, crucially, the expletive subjects have to be absent in certain cases due to the Projection Principle. The knowledge of this phenomenon by second language (L2) learners has been investigated by two methods, elicited written production task and grammaticality judgment tests. High-level non-native speakers of German differ significantly from native speakers in both types of tasks. The differences are clearly not the result of transfer. The results reported here reveal permanent optionality in L2 grammars suggesting a deficit in the grammatical representations of L2 learners.

The present study investigated the influence of lexical links and conceptual mediation in number word translation. In four experiments, a semantic blocking paradigm was used with numerical stimuli and stimuli from other non-number categories. The performance of Spanish L1–English L2 bilinguals was examined in backward and forward translation (Experiment 1 and 3), in naming Arabic digits and pictures (Experiment 2A) and in reading L1 and L2 words (Experiment 2B). The blocked context produced a facilitatory effect for numerical stimuli in the lower range. This result contrasts with the interference effect observed for stimuli from non-number categories in translation and naming tasks. These results are interpreted to mean that the translation of number words, particularly those in the lower range of the numeric sequence, takes place with a large influence of the lexical connections. It supports the suggestions that the influence of processing routes depends on the type of items.

Previous work suggests that child-internal and -external factors influence dual language learning (DLL), although more work is needed – to clarify the role of phonological short-term memory (PSTM) and language exposure in particular. Accordingly, we investigated the role of language exposure and PSTM in phonological awareness and receptive and expressive vocabulary development in the majority language in DLL. PSTM was measured with both a language-specific and language-universal nonword repetition task (NWR). Sixty-five DLL preschoolers were assessed twice, five months apart. Results show that maternal majority-language proficiency as well as language-specific and universal NWR predicted all outcomes, whereas length of exposure to the majority language only predicted receptive and expressive vocabulary. Current exposure did not predict any outcome. The findings extend previous research on child-internal and child-external factors as predictors of DLL to phonological awareness and language-universal NWR.

Twitter data from a crisis that impacted many English–Spanish bilinguals show that the direction of codeswitches is associated with the statistically documented tendency of single speakers to prefer one language over another in their tweets, as gleaned from their tweeting history. Further, lexical diversity, a measure of vocabulary richness derived from information-theoretic measures of uncertainty in communication, is greater in proximity to a codeswitch than in productions remote from a switch. The prospects of a role for lexical diversity in characterizing the conditions for a language switch suggest that communicative precision may induce conditions that attenuate constraints against language mixing.

The study explores how native language (L1) lexical access is affected by immersion in a second-language (L2) environment, and by short-term reimmersion in the L1 environment. We compared the L1 picture-naming performance of Polish–English bilinguals living in the UK (migrants) against that of bilinguals living in Poland (controls). Each group was tested twice: the migrants while in the UK (L2 immersion) and after visiting Poland (L1 reimmersion); the controls twice in their L1 environment. Contrary to our expectations, there was no main effect of group, thus suggesting that L2 immersion per se does not impact L1 lexical access. Nevertheless, migrants benefitted from L1 reimmersion by showing faster naming latencies for high-frequency words after a short visit to their home country, probably due to more opportunities to encounter these words. Overall, the study shows that the cognitive system is sensitive to the language environment by quickly adapting the activation level of lexical items.

Orthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, <z>. Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not automatically lead to non-native production.

In two online survey studies (N = 688 and N = 247, respectively) we developed and validated a new psychometric scale for measuring emotional resonance reduction in bilinguals’ LX (“later learnt language”) relative to their L1 (“first language”). The final scale, dubbed RER-LX (for Reduced Emotional Resonance in LX), comprises 15 items and possesses a number of desirable psychometric properties. It yields good test reliability (expected alpha between 0.8 and 0.9), produces near-normally distributed test scores, and exhibits content validity in terms of its underlying factor structure. Moreover, it correlates well with the only other instrument previously used for the same purpose (BEQ subscale comprising BEQ-swearing, BEQ-feelings and BEQ-anger). However, compared to the BEQ items, RER-LX has significantly better discriminant validity in relation to LexTALE, a widely used measure of proficiency in English as a second language. Our new scale will be useful to researchers studying bilingualism and emotion.

The work presented here aims to account for the structure of intrasentential code switching between English and Afrikaans within the framework of feature checking theory, a theory associated with minimalist syntax. Six constructions in which verb position differs between English and Afrikaans were analysed in terms of differences in the strength of particular features associated with functional categories, and the ability of verbs of either language to check these features. Predictions for the well-formedness of code-switched constructions were informed by data elicited from thirty fluently bilingual participants by means of relative judgements of visually-presented code-switched sentences and auditorily-presented code-switched utterances, and a sentence construction task. Findings indicated straightforward support for the predictions for adverb, focalisation, and topicalisation constructions, but less support for embedded that and wh clauses and yes-no questions. Alternative explanations for the latter results are proposed. The work suggests that the same mechanisms and devices proposed to account for monolingual data can also account for code-switching data.