This study investigates the processing of resyllabified words by native English speakers at three proficiency levels in French and by native French speakers. In particular, it examines non-native listeners’ development of a parsing procedure for recognizing vowel-initial words in the context of liaison, a process that creates a misalignment of the syllable and word boundaries in French. The participants completed an eye-tracking experiment in which they identified liaison- and consonant-initial real and nonce words in auditory stimuli. The results show that the non-native listeners had little difficulty recognizing liaison-initial real words, and they recognized liaison-initial nonce words more rapidly than consonant-initial ones. By contrast, native listeners recognized consonant-initial real and nonce words more rapidly than liaison-initial ones. These results suggest that native and non-native listeners used different parsing procedures for recognizing liaison-initial words in the task, with the non-native listeners’ ability to segment liaison-initial words being phonologically abstract rather than lexical.

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.

Research on the relationship between language and cognition in bilinguals has often focused on general effects that are common to bilinguals of all language backgrounds, such as the positive effects of bilingualism in various areas of cognitive development (e.g., Bialystok, 2005; Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). However, there are also language-specific effects in the relationship between language and cognition in bilinguals that emerge in the form of cross-linguistic influence and, in many cases, these cross-linguistic effects do not appear to be confined to purely linguistic (e.g., phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic) phenomena. For example, bilinguals’ choice of words for referring to objects and actions, as well as their choice of syntactic and discursive structures for referring to events and situations, often reflect ways of conveying meaning and intentions that are specific to particular language backgrounds.

Children acquiring their first languages are frequently regarded as the principal agents of diachronic change. The causes and the precise nature of the processes of change are, however, far from clear. The following discussion focuses on possible changes of core properties of grammars which, in terms of the theory of Universal Grammar, can be characterized as reflecting different settings of parameters. In such cases, learners develop grammatical competences differing from those of speakers of the previous generation who provided the primary data serving as input for the developmental processes. It has been argued that reanalyses of this type must be conceived of as instances of transmission failure. Yet acquisition research has demonstrated that the human Language Making Capacity is extraordinarily robust, thus leading to the question of what might cause unsuccessful acquisition. Changing frequencies in use or exposure to data containing ambiguous or even contradictory evidence are unlikely to suffice as causes for this to happen. Language acquisition in multilingual settings may be a more plausible source of grammatical reanalysis than monolingual first language development. The study of contemporary bilingualism can therefore contribute to an explanation of diachronic change. Yet one such insight is that simultaneous acquisition of two languages (2L1) typically leads to a kind of grammatical knowledge in each language which is qualitatively not different from that of the respective monolinguals, obliging us to look for other sources of transmission failure. 2L1 acquisition in settings where one language is “weaker” than the other has been claimed to qualify as such. But I will argue that even such problematic cases do not provide convincing evidence of reanalysis. If, on the other hand, children receive sustained input from second language learners, or if their onset of acquisition is delayed, this can indeed lead to incomplete acquisition. I conclude that successive acquisition of bilingualism plays a crucial role as a source of grammatical change. In order for such changes to happen, however, grammar-internal and language-external factors may have to concur.

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.

Previous studies demonstrate that lexical coding of colour influences categorical perception of colour, such that participants are more likely to rate two colours to be more similar if they belong to the same linguistic category (Roberson et al., 2000, 2005). Recent work shows changes in Greek–English bilinguals' perception of within and cross-category stimulus pairs as a function of the availability of the relevant colour terms in semantic memory, and the amount of time spent in the L2-speaking country (Athanasopoulos, 2009). The present paper extends Athanasopoulos' (2009) investigation by looking at cognitive processing of colour in Japanese–English bilinguals. Like Greek, Japanese contrasts with English in that it has an additional monolexemic term for ‘light blue’ (mizuiro). The aim of the paper is to examine to what degree linguistic and extralinguistic variables modulate Japanese–English bilinguals' sensitivity to the blue/light blue distinction. Results showed that those bilinguals who used English more frequently distinguished blue and light blue stimulus pairs less well than those who used Japanese more frequently. These results suggest that bilingual cognition may be dynamic and flexible, as the degree to which it resembles that of either monolingual norm is, in this case, fundamentally a matter of frequency of language use.

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic and taxonomic relations that senior Chinese high school students had in L2 differed from the pattern they had in their first language (L1). The results consistently indicated that (i) the participants appeared as aware of taxonomic relations in L2 as they were in L1; and (ii) they were more readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L1 but less readily aware of thematic than of taxonomic relations in L2. It was concluded that with taxonomic relations, low-proficiency bilinguals could have a common set of conceptual representations for both L2 and L1, as they are assumed in the revised hierarchical model (RHM) to have. With thematic associations, they might have more difficulty gaining access to their representations in L2 than they might have in L1.

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian–English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective–noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju položite zvezdočku . . . “Red put star . . .” whose inherent contrastiveness results from integration of multiple sources of information, i.e., word order, prosody and visual context. The results showed that while monolinguals rapidly used word order and visual context (but not contrastive prosody) to compute the contrast set even before the noun appeared in speech, heritage Russian bilinguals were very slow and took notice of multiple sources of information only when the lexical identity of the noun made the task superfluous. These results are similar to slowed processing reported in the literature for L2 learners. It is hypothesized that this slowdown in HL processing is due to cascading effects of covert competition between the two languages that starts at the level of spoken word recognition and culminates at the interfaces and, with time, it may become a major contributing force to heritage language attrition.

We examine morphosyntactic knowledge of Labrador Inuttitut by Inuit receptive bilinguals (RBs) – heritage speakers who are capable of comprehension, but produce little or no speech. A grammaticality judgment study suggests that RBs possess sensitivity to morphosyntactic violations, though to a lesser degree than fluent bilinguals. Low-proficiency RBs are sensitive only to the most basic grammatical properties. Case omission is most difficult to detect, but morphemes bearing incorrect features (case oversuppliance, number agreement mismatch) or ordered incorrectly (tense and agreement, tense and negation) are easier, and performance on incorrect ordering of morphemes is near target with the core agreement morpheme for all RBs. While receptive bilinguals show patterns of grammatical deficits, they also demonstrate clear knowledge of the basic properties of word structure in Inuttitut. This has implications both for the psycholinguistics of bilingualism and for language revitalization efforts.

We examined first language (L1) naming of common household objects in three groups of Russian–English bilinguals: early, childhood and late bilinguals. Their naming patterns were compared with those of native speakers of Russian and English, in order to detect possible second language (L2) English influence on L1 Russian naming patterns. We investigated whether such influence is modulated by the speaker's linguistic trajectory, specifically, their age of arrival in the L2 environment, which in turn influences their relative proficiency and dominance in the two languages. We also examined whether the potential for L2 shifts can be linked to specific characteristics of the categories in the L1 or L2. L2 influence was evident in the data, increasing with earlier age of arrival but most pronounced with lowest L1 proficiency. The changes entailed both narrowing and broadening of linguistic categories. These findings indicate that L1 word use is susceptible to L2 influence even for concrete nouns referring to familiar objects, and the nature of the shift for a given word appears to be driven by several factors.

There is a long linguistic tradition in which language change is explained in terms of first language acquisition. In this tradition, children are considered to be the agents of language change, or at least the agents of changes in the underlying grammar. Since the early 1980s, this has been formulated in the (generative) terminology in terms of parameters set by children: whereas an older generation acquires one particular setting of a parameter (during childhood), a next generation of L1 children may set a parameter differently, based on the input of their parents, and this may lead to a different output. For obvious reasons this argumentation had to be built on theoretical rather than empirical work on language acquisition. There are no children acquiring Old English or Middle Dutch, and, in fact, the field of acquisition research was until recently much less developed and very often not focused on the type of facts that happened to play a role in discussions of language change.

This study investigates the acquisition of speech rhythm by Cantonese–English bilingual children and their age-matched monolingual peers. Languages can be classified in terms of rhythmic characteristics that define English as stress-timed and Cantonese as syllable-timed. Few studies have examined the concurrent acquisition of rhythmically different languages in bilingual children. This study uses data of six Cantonese–English bilingual children around age 3;0 and compares them with six monolingual children in each language using recently developed acoustic rhythmic metrics on consonantal, vocalic and syllabic intervals. Qualitative data on syllable structure complexity and vowel quality are also included. Results on syllable duration show that monolingual children display distinct rhythmic patterns while the differences between the two languages of the bilingual children are less distinct. Bilingual English has less durational variability than monolingual English. Bilingual children have a distinct phonological developmental trajectory from monolingual children, which is manifested in acquisition delay and is influenced by language dominance. This shows that the two phonologies interact at the prosodic level.

Three experiments using a priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted to examine whether cross-language activation occurs via decomposition during the processing of derived words in Korean–English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, when participants were given a real derived word and an interpretable derived pseudoword (i.e., illegal combination of a stem and a suffix) in Korean as a prime, response times for the corresponding English-translated stem were significantly faster than when they had received an unrelated word. In Experiment 2, non-morphological ending pseudowords (i.e., illegal combination of a stem and an orthographic ending) were included, and this did not show a priming effect. In Experiment 3, non-interpretable derived pseudowords also yielded a significant priming effect just as the interpretable ones. These results together suggest that cross-language activation of morphologically complex words occurs independently of lexicality and interpretability.

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nüse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1 Spanish – L2 Swedish bilinguals (all near-native speakers of Swedish). Spanish and Swedish differ as regards grammatical aspect: whereas Swedish lacks this grammatical category, Spanish conveys aspect through verbal morphology and periphrasis. The principal aim of the study was to explore the relationship between productive event conceptualization patterns and receptive decoding proficiency related to aspectual contrasts. The participants were asked to provide oral L1 Spanish descriptions of video clips projecting motion events with different degrees of endpoint orientation (see von Stutterheim, 2003). In addition, they took a grammaticality judgment test concerning verb and gender agreement, verbal clitics and aspectual contrasts. Compared with baseline data from monolingual Spanish speakers, the results on endpoint encoding show that the bilinguals mention the endpoints of motion events to a higher degree than the Spanish control group does. Moreover, it was shown that the weaker the bilinguals' discrimination of aspectual errors on the grammaticality judgment test, the more prone they were to encoding endpoints. This result consequently furthers the hypothesis about the interconnectedness between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization. The results were further interpreted as indicating that the bilinguals are influenced by the Swedish-like tendency to attend to the boundedness rather than the ongoingness of events.

This article reports the results of an experiment on production of his/her in English as a second language (L2) by proficient native speakers of Italian, Spanish, and Dutch. In Dutch and English, 3rd person singular possessive pronouns agree in gender with their antecedents, in Italian and Spanish possessives in general agree with the noun they accompany (possessum). However, while in Italian the 3rd person singular possessives overtly agree in gender with the possessums, in Spanish they lack overt morphological gender marking. Dutch speakers were found to make very few possessive gender errors in any condition, Spanish and Italian speakers, on the other hand, behaved like Dutch speakers when the possessum was inanimate, but made more errors when it was animate (e.g., his mother). Thus, even proficient L2 speakers are susceptible to the influence of automatic processes that should apply in their first language alone. The pattern of results has implications for pronoun production and models of bilingual language production.

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 paper examines the influence of age of immersion and proficiency in a second language on speech movement consistency in both a first and a second language. Ten monolingual speakers of English and 20 Bengali–English bilinguals (10 with low L2 proficiency and 10 with high L2 proficiency) participated. Lip movement variability was assessed based on bilingual participants’ production of four real and four novel words embedded in Bengali (L1) and English (L2) sentences. Lip movement variability was evaluated across L1 and L2 contexts for the production of real and novel words with trochaic and iambic stress pattern. Adult bilinguals produced equally consistent speech movement patterns in their production of L1 and L2 targets. Overall, speakers’ L2 proficiency did not influence their movement variability. Unlike children, the speech motor systems of adult L2 speakers exhibit a lack of flexibility which could contribute to their increased difficulties in acquiring native-like pronunciation in L2.

This experimental study investigates event construal by early Dutch–German bilinguals, as reflected in their oral depiction of everyday events shown in video clips. The starting point is the finding that the expression of an aspectual perspective (progressive aspect), and its consequences for event construal, is dependent on the extent to which means are grammaticalized, as in English (e.g., progressive aspect) or not, as in German (von Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006). The present study shows that although speakers of Dutch and German have comparable means to mark this aspectual concept, at a first glance at least, they differ markedly both in the contexts as well as in the extent to which this aspectual perspective is selected, being highly frequent in specific contexts in Dutch, but not in German. The present experimental study investigates factors that lead to the use of progressive aspect by early bilinguals, using video clips (with different types of events varied along specific dimensions on a systematic basis). The study includes recordings of eye movements, and examines how far an aspectual perspective drives allocation of attention during information intake while viewing the stimulus material, both for and while speaking. Although the bilinguals have acquired the means to express progressive aspect in Dutch, their use shows a pattern that differs from monolingual Dutch speakers. Interestingly, these differences are reflected in different patterns in the direction of attention (eye movements) when verbalizing information on events.

The present study explores knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender in both comprehension and production by heritage language speakers and second language (L2) learners, with native Spanish speakers as a baseline. Most L2 research has tended to interpret morphosyntactic variability in interlanguage production, such as errors in gender agreement, as a lack of native-like representation in the learner's grammar because of maturational constraints. From this perspective, adult English-speaking learners of Spanish are incapable of acquiring gender fully, whereas heritage Spanish speakers, who have been exposed to the language from birth, can attain complete gender acquisition. However, results of two tasks, one measuring written comprehension and the other oral production, show that advanced proficiency L2 learners, as well as advanced proficiency heritage speakers, have gender in their underlying grammars, and that the errors in oral production that L2 learners occasionally produce are due to difficulties in the surface manifestations of the abstract features of gender, i.e., the “mapping problem” (Lardiere, 2007).

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.