Cunnings (2016) provides welcome insights into differences between native speaker (NS) sentence processing, adult non-native speaker processing (NNS), and working memory capacity (WMC) limitations. This commentary briefly raises three issues: construct operationalization; the role of first language (L1); and context.

Jürgen Meisel's (JM) article is literally thought-provoking, especially for the issues that one can raise out of the central position that he develops, viz., “although bilingual acquisition in situations of language contact can be argued to be of significant importance for explanations of grammatical change, reanalysis affecting parameter settings is much less likely to happen than is commonly assumed in historical linguistics” (p. 142). This is a position that calls for grounding language change, hence historical linguistics, in the pragmatics/ethnography of language practice, a question that linguists can continue to ignore no more than the actuation question (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968; McMahon, 1994; Labov, 2001; Mufwene, 2008). The latter regards what particular ethnographic factors trigger particular changes at particular places and at particular times but not at others. In other words, do structural changes happen simply because they must happen or because particular agents are involved at specific times under specific ecological conditions of language practice?

This study aimed to analyze whether there are differences between bilingual (Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish) and monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) school children regarding reading and writing learning achievement, in executive functions (EF) components and metalinguistic abilities. Twenty-three bilingual and 23 monolingual children, aged 6 to 8 years, were assessed in terms of their writing, reading, and metalinguistic abilities, and with verbal and non-verbal tasks testing EF. A bilingual advantage was observed in reading and writing abilities and in 16 of the 44 EF measures, including subcomponents of working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility, and executive attention, mainly in non-verbal paradigms, while monolingual children outperformed bilingual ones in three scores: counting errors (Five Digits Test), omission of bells (Bells test) and sequential trial B (Trail Making Test). There were moderate and weak effect sizes in metalinguistic subcomponents showing bilingual advantage. Literacy improvement seems to have the potential to increase linguistic and cognitive abilities.

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.

Evidence from various empirical study types have converged to show bilingualism's potential for serving as a cognitive and brain reserves contributor. In this article, I contextualize, frame the need for and offer some expanding questions in this endeavor, inclusive of empirical pathways to address them. While the set of variables and questions discussed herein are definitively incomplete, they embody a good starting point for shaping future directions in research that considers the role bilingual language engagement can have for the developing mind and brain, inclusive of how various, non-linear factors impact the descent bilinguals of various types take down the proverbial mountain of life.

Meisel (hereafter, M) has offered a well-argued and tightly structured piece, discussing in a clear and compelling way a crucial topic in the understanding of language change. I applaud him for both the content and the presentation.

Poplack, Zentz and Dion (PZD; Poplack, Zentz & Dion, 2011, this issue) examine the often unquestioned assumption that the existence of preposition stranding (PS) in Canadian French is linked to the presence of a contact situation with English in the North American context. Although this issue has been the topic of previous research from a syntactic perspective (Bouchard, 1982; Vinet, 1979, 1984), to my knowledge, it has never been explored using variationist sociolinguistic methods applied to a large corpus of spontaneous speech, with emphasis on code-switchers as potential agents of contact-induced change.

One of the cool aspects of the original implementation of the BIA model (van Heuven, Dijkstra & Grainger, 1998) was the discovery that inhibitory connections between language nodes and lexical representations was a necessary feature for the model to be able to simulate the target data set at that time. This demonstrates the importance of computational modeling, a key point of the present target article, since inhibitory connections were postulated to occur only between representations at the same level in the conceptual model (Grainger & Dijkstra, 1992). Top-down inhibition was subsequently dropped in the BIA+ model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002), and the Multilink model of the present target article (Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte & Rekké, 2018) goes one step further by removing all kinds of inhibitory connections, both between and within levels. Instead, the authors of the model propose that bilingual language processing relies on bidirectional excitatory connections between representations at different levels. This is curious given that even more evidence has accumulated in favor of inhibition since the original implementation of the BIA model, both between neighboring lexical representations (i.e., lateral inhibition) and from language membership representations (e.g., language nodes and tags) down to lexical representations. In this commentary, we focus on whether the exclusion of these two inhibitory processes is warranted, and how the inclusion of these processes might benefit future developments of the model.

The recent trend in psycholinguistics from autonomous, rule-oriented models with symbolic representations towards more interactive, regularity oriented, and subsymbolic models reflects an increasing awareness that the finer aspects of cognitive processing may be sensitive to “contextual factors.” Apparently, there is systematic variability in the data that depends on task demands and stimulus list composition, and their effect on the strategies and decision criteria maintained by the experimental subject. However, most current (computational) models at best embody a task-independent stimulus identification process with a simple decision process operating in the same rigid manner across different tasks (Dijkstra & de Smedt, 1996).

To examine the combined effects of ageing and bilingualism in language processing, we tested young and older mono- and bilingual speakers in L1 comprehension and production. In Experiment 1, bilinguals were slower to detect words than monolinguals in sentences with a low-constraint context, but not when a high-constraint context was provided. Older adults tended to outperform younger adults in high-constraint sentences. In Experiment 2, older speakers were slower than younger speakers to produce small-scope prepositional phrases (e.g., ‘the cone above the grape), suggesting more extensive planning. Bilingual disadvantages were observed in larger-scope complex phrases (e.g., ‘the cone and the pink grape’). Individual differences in language proficiency did not modulate the effects. The results support bilingual disadvantages in syntactic processing and age-preserved syntax, alongside semantic processing unaffected by either bilingualism or age. We found no interactions between age and bilingualism, suggesting that these two factors independently impact language processing.

This study compared late bilinguals’ pitch feedback control in L1 and L2 production using a frequency-altered feedback paradigm in which participants read target words while presented with unexpected pitch-shift in their voice feedback. Variables of language (L1 or L2) and perturbation magnitudes (0, 100, 200, or 400 cents) were manipulated. Behaviorally, participants produced larger magnitudes but longer latencies of vocal compensation in L2 than in L1 production, suggesting that L2 pitch feedback control has greater importance but lower efficiency. Event-related potential findings demonstrated that 400-cent shifts elicited greater N1 amplitudes than those in the 0-cent baseline condition in L1 production. This difference was non-significant in L2 production, implying different neural processing of unaltered feedback and externally-generated feedback in L1 and L2 production. Participants’ vocal compensation and P2 amplitudes were similarly modulated by pitch-shift in L1 and L2 production, implying a similar gating mechanism to correct internal and external errors.

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.

This study investigated the engagement of domain-general cognitive control during the comprehension of dense code-switching sentences. Stimulus-locked event-related potentials (ERPs) were measured while L1-dominant Chinese–English bilinguals read switch and non-switch sentences. The results of the reading task revealed language dominance effects on the N400, left anterior negativity (LAN) and late positive component (LPC). The language dominance effects at lexical level (i.e., on the N400 and LAN) were modulated by individual differences in monitoring capacity. In contrast, inhibition capacity predicted code-switching costs at the sentence level (i.e., for the LPC component). The results suggest that proactive monitoring and reactive inhibition affect different processing stages during the comprehension of dense code-switching sentences. These findings partially align with processing models of code-switching incorporating a dual control mode perspective and contribute new insight into the dynamic interplay between reactive and proactive control processes.

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.

Studies investigating the role of dual language use in modulating executive functions have reported mixed results, with some studies reporting benefits in older adults. These studies typically focus on bilingual settings, while the role of dual language use in diglossic settings is rarely investigated. In diglossia, the two language varieties are separated by context, making it an ideal test case for the effects on cognition of Single Language Contexts, as defined by the Adaptive Control Hypothesis (Green & Abutalebi, 2013). We compare the performances of three groups of older adults, Arab diglossics (n = 28), bilinguals (n = 29), and monolinguals (n = 41), on the Flanker and Stroop tasks, measuring inhibition abilities, and the Color-shape task, measuring switching abilities. We report a diglossic benefit in inhibition as measured by the Flanker task only, and no benefits for the bilingual group. These findings are discussed with reference to conversational contexts in dual language use.

The five papers in this issue cover a range of perspectives on the acquisition and use of the Spanish copulas ser and estar in a variety of contexts, including language contact, bilingual language acquisition, and classroom second language learning. The fact that these papers cite work in this area as far back as the early part of the 20th century with each subsequent decade being represented suggests the continual importance and complexity of the distinction between the two copular forms and shows how this complexity is played out in acquisition and bilingual use. Over the past century different perspectives have been taken on this multifaceted issue with linguistic explanations and the role of the native language being primary. In this epilogue, we focus on some of these same issues, but expand our commentary to include the new dimensions represented in this collection of papers: (i) context of learning (input), (ii) prior knowledge as represented by other language(s) known, (iii) item-learning and lexical development, and (iv) innovations in methodology.

Several multilingual language production models assume that language control is instigated by conflict monitoring. In turn, conflict adaptation, a control process which makes it easier to resolve interference if previously a high-interference context was detected, should also occur during multilingual production, as it is triggered by conflict monitoring. Because no evidence has been provided for conflict adaptation in the multilingual production literature, we set out to investigate this process using the n-3 effect. Our study showed that the n-3 effect can be observed during multilingual production, and thus provides evidence for conflict adaptation during multilingual production.