Findings of bilingual participants outperforming their monolingual counterparts in executive functioning tasks have been repeatedly reported in the literature (Bialystok, 2017). However, uncontrolled factors or imperfectly matched samples might affect the reliability of these findings. This study aims to take into account a range of relevant variables in combination with innovative analyses to investigate the performance of one unstudied language group, Greek–English bilingual children in the north of England, compared to monolingual control groups. Our battery of executive function tasks taps into inhibition, updating and shifting. We use k-means nearest neighbour methods to match the groups and factor analysis to determine language proficiency. We find that bilinguals’ accuracy is on a par with their monolingual peers – however, they are faster in inhibition and working memory tasks. Our study provides strong evidence for the presence of a bilingual advantage in these domains, while making important methodological contributions to the field.

Contraction of want to to wanna is sometimes possible (e.g., Who do you want to/wanna stay with ___ ?), but sometimes impossible (e.g., Who do you want ___ to/*wanna stay?). This contrast is attributable to the grammatical constraint that a wh-trace blocks the contraction of want and to. Most first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition studies testing learner knowledge of this constraint have used elicited production tasks and focused on adult participants, with inconsistent results. Using a child-friendly acceptability judgment task, the current study shows that children as young as 3;11 and both child and adult L2 learners have target-like knowledge of the constraint on wanna contraction. This result is in line with the position that L1 acquisition, child L2 acquisition, and adult L2 acquisition are qualitatively similar.

Bimodal bilingualism refers to a type of bilingualism that employs two different input-output channels, one involving spoken language and the other involving sign language. Until the second half of the twentieth century, sign language was not recognized as a fully-fledged language and there was very little research devoted to bilingual sign language speakers (Grosjean, 1992). In the last two decades, however, interest in the study of bimodal bilingualism, including the cognitive effects of bimodal bilingualism and the neural organization of spoken and sign languages, has increased considerably. Furthermore, the particular significance of studies of bimodal bilingualism for understanding bilingual language representation and processing more generally has been properly recognized. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition has not been silent or inactive on this front. Two years ago we specifically added the study of bimodal bilingualism to the journal's core areas of interest, and we are glad to see an increased number of research articles on bimodal bilingualism (e.g., Giezen & Emmorey, 2016; Rinaldi & Caselli, 2014; Williams & Newman, 2015; Morford et al., in press; Kaufmann & Philipp, in press).

Jürgen Meisel argues that “grammatical variation. . .can be described. . .in terms of parametric variation”, and – crucially for his arguments in this paper – that “parameter settings do not change across the lifespan”. To this extent he adopts the standard generative view, but he then departs from what he calls “the literature on historical linguistics” (by which he means the generative literature only) in developing the arguments leading to his major claims: that only “transmission failure” resulting from L2 acquisition can produce parametric morphosyntactic change; that any L2 learners, children or adults, may be the agents of change; that such changes “happen less frequently than is commonly assumed”; and that, “in larger and more complex societies, situations in which L2 learners exert a major influence on a language are most likely to emerge in periods of substantial demographic changes” (his example is a plague that kills most members of a speech community). Adult L2 learners, according to Meisel, can only be agents of parametric change if they provide most or all of the input for the next generation's L1 acquisition.

People who were mostly exposed to English with an accent in the early home environment are more native-like when performing various English tasks, compared to those who were mostly exposed to their non-English heritage language (Tao & Taft, 2016). The present study extends from the work of Tao and Taft (2016), further exploring the effects of early home language environment on linguistic and cognitive outcomes later in life. Three groups of young adult participants who differed in their early home language environment were examined on speech comprehension and executive function tasks. Results showed that people who were exposed mostly to non-English heritage languages have disadvantages relative to native monolingual speakers in the comprehension of certain types of stimuli, but show advantages in their executive functioning. Those exposed mostly to nonstandard English showed a less robust advantage in executive functions over native speakers, and showed no apparent disadvantage in speech comprehension.

Carroll's critique (Carroll) of the field of bilingualism yields strong directives. Let us not study specific groups of bilinguals, and make big claims about bilingual learning. Let us not study one domain, say vocabulary, and generalize to bilinguals’ language. These are all valid points. She also voices strong skepticism about how current literature deals with language experience:

This study investigated the effects of L2 learning experience in relation to L1 background on hemispheric processing of Japanese pitch accent. Native Mandarin Chinese (tonal L1) and English (non-tonal L1) learners of Japanese were tested using dichotic listening. These listener groups were compared with those recruited in Wu, Tu & Wang (2012), including native Mandarin and English listeners without Japanese experience and native Japanese listeners. Results revealed an overall right-hemisphere preference across groups, suggesting acoustically oriented processing. Individual pitch accent patterns also revealed pattern-specific laterality differences, further reflecting acoustic-level processing. However, listener group differences indicated L1 effects, with the Chinese but not English listeners approximating the Japanese patterns. Furthermore, English learners but not naïve listeners exhibited a shift towards the native direction, revealing effects of L2 learning. These findings imply integrated effects of acoustic and linguistic aspects on Japanese pitch accent processing as a function of L1 and L2 experience.

Ouh que c'est laid! “Oh this is ugly!” is one of the comments among the 11,800 hits on Google for the sequence “la fille que je sors avec” [the girl I go out with]. Often the comments include the idea that the whole expression has been taken from English as a direct calque. The authors of the present keynote article, Poplack, Zentz and Dion (Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue), argue convincingly that this type of preposition stranding in Canadian French cannot be ascribed to language contact with English. Using sound and accountable methodology, derived from the research paradigm of variationist sociolinguistics, they manage to disprove the hypothesis of a direct causal link between the expression in Canadian French and its supposed earlier use in English. Thus, an icon of language contact, both in popular perception and in many not-so-well-informed academic sources, has been shattered.

Initial studies on the acquisition of two Spanish copulas, ser and estar, emerged from a research agenda exploring whether second language (L2) development was driven by universal mechanisms manifested in stages rather than an accumulation of entities (Rutherford, 1987). Concerning the Spanish copulas, the stages of acquisition through which Spanish L2 learners pass seem – with a few exceptions – to be largely uniform (e.g. estar + locative, ser/estar + adjective; VanPatten, 1987; Ryan & Lafford, 1992; Geeslin, 2000). Cheng, Lu and Giannakouros provide one of the first studies which partially test the assumption of universality, examining Mandarin Chinese speakers' copula behaviors over different levels of development. The work of Geeslin as well as Cheng, Lu and Giannakouros is valuable not so much because it provides insights into copula development but rather because this work is building a model for predicting the interaction in general terms between aspectual, semantic, and pragmatic factors and the acquisition of both grammatical and lexical L2 phenomena.

Goldrick, Putnam and Schwarz (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) have offered an account that must delight all linguists who have spent an inordinate amount of their professional time working on understanding the grammar of bilingual language use – just how, and why, do bilinguals produce the utterances that they do. The computational approach Goldrick et al. propose blends the grammatical principles (of the optimality kind) with general processing constraints to yield patterns of code-mixing that may be sparse – the emergence of doubled elements in bilinguals’ utterances – but certainly needing an explanation. Their Gradient Symbolic Computation model is, in fact, the first robust account of the presence of doubled elements, i.e., an element of the utterance is doubled, appearing in both languages within a single utterance (see 1 below). Their account, however, does force them to make an important, but vulnerable, theoretical assumption: that grammatical principles can refer to language membership. It recalls, albeit obliquely, Belazi, Rubin and Toribio's much discussed ‘Language’ feature needed to mobilize their Functional Head Constraint (see Bhatt, 1997, for an empirical and theoretical critique of the Functional Head Constraint).

Listeners can adapt to errors in foreign-accented speech, but not all errors are alike. We investigated whether exposure to unsystematic tone errors in second language Mandarin impacts responses to accurately produced words. Native Mandarin speakers completed a cross-modal priming task with words produced by foreign-accented talkers who either produced consistently correct tones, or frequent tone errors. Facilitation from primes bearing correct tones was unaffected by the presence of tone errors elsewhere in the talker's speech. However, primes bearing tone errors inhibited recognition of real words and elicited stronger accentedness ratings. We consider theoretical implications for tone in foreign-accent adaptation.

Predictors and control variables were not distinguished in Tables 4–8 of the paper by Lee, Lu and Garnsey (2013). The corrected tables are provided below. The authors apologize for these errors.

According to the “reduced emotionality hypothesis”, we are less emotionally driven when reasoning in a foreign language (FL) than in a native language (NL). We examined whether this foreign language effect (FLe) extends to the way we perceive motivational quotes (i.e., encouraging slogans conveying a profound and inspirational message): we expected FL participants to rate motivational quotes as less profound than NL participants. Strikingly, we observed the opposite: FL participants found motivational quotes more profound than NL participants, even after controlling for potential confounders (e.g., IQ, reasoning style). Both FL and NL participants gave similarly low profundity ratings to pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (i.e., meaningless sentences sounding profound), indicating that the message must be meaningful for the FLe to arise. We propose that, like space or time, language could promote psychological distance. This favours a focus on the background of a message to indicate profoundness.

This study examines to what extent phonetic reduction in different accents affects intelligibility for non-native (L2) listeners, and whether similar reduction processes in listeners’ first language (L1) facilitate the recognition and processing of reduced word forms in the target language. In two experiments, 80 Dutch-speaking and 80 Spanish-speaking learners of English were presented with unreduced and reduced pronunciation variants in native and non-native English speech. Results showed that unreduced words are recognized more accurately and more quickly than reduced words, regardless of whether these variants occur in non-regionally, regionally or non-native accented speech. No differential effect of phonetic reduction on intelligibility and spoken word recognition was observed between Dutch-speaking and Spanish-speaking participants, despite the absence of strong vowel reduction in Spanish. These findings suggest that similar speech processes in listeners’ L1 and L2 do not invariably lead to an intelligibility benefit or a cross-linguistic facilitation effect in lexical access.

Whereas growing evidence supports the advantages of bilingualism for brain structure and function, no study has shown multilingual-related neuroplasticity in response to speech stimuli at the subcortical level. To investigate the impact of multilingualism on subcortical auditory processing, the speech auditory evoked response (speech-ABR) was recorded on 35 young adults. The multilingual group completed the language experience and proficiency questionnaire (LEAP-Q). The results were that multilingual participants demonstrated evidence of enhanced neural timing processing, including a shorter wave D latency and the V-A duration, and a sharper V-A slope compared to the monolinguals in silence. In the noise condition, the speech-ABR measures degraded in most components, and no significant difference was observed between the two groups. The association between the total proficiency score and several subcortical responses was significant. This shows subcortical evidence of stronger neural synchronization in multilinguals relative to monolinguals, correlated with the self-report of multilingual experience.

For bilinguals, lexical access in one language may affect, or be affected by, activation of words in another language. Research to date suggests seemingly contradictory effects of such cross-linguistic influence (CLI): in some cases CLI facilitates lexical access while in others it is a hindrance. Here we provide a comprehensive review of CLI effects drawn from multiple disciplines and paradigms. We describe the contexts within which CLI gives rise to facilitation and interference and suggest that these two general effects arise from separate mechanisms that are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, we argue that facilitation is ubiquitous, occurring in virtually all instances of CLI, while interference is not always present and depends on levels of cross-language lexical competition. We discuss three critical factors – language context, direction, and modality of CLI – which appear to modulate facilitation and interference. Overall, we hope to provide a general framework for investigating CLI in future research.

Responding to an invitation to comment on Pienemann's paper leaves me on the horns of a dilemma: I think the approach is novel and shows how future second language acquisition (SLA) research can be done. However, it is difficult to judge from the paper what the exact contribution of the theory is to be.