Two languages, historically related, both have lexical stress, with word stress distinctions signalled in each by the same suprasegmental cues. In each language, words can overlap segmentally but differ in placement of primary versus secondary stress (OCtopus, ocTOber). However, secondary stress occurs more often in the words of one language, Dutch, than in the other, English, and largely because of this, Dutch listeners find it helpful to use suprasegmental stress cues when recognising spoken words. English listeners, in contrast, do not; indeed, Dutch listeners can outdo English listeners in correctly identifying the source words of English word fragments (oc-). Here we show that Dutch-native listeners who reside in an English-speaking environment and have become dominant in English, though still maintaining their use of these stress cues in their L1, ignore the same cues in their L2 English, performing as poorly in the fragment identification task as the L1 English do.

The cross-linguistic gender congruency effect (GCE; a facilitation on gender retrieval for translations of the same gender) is a robust phenomenon analysed almost exclusively with late bilinguals. However, it is important to ascertain whether it is modulated by age of acquisition (AoA) and language proficiency. We asked 64 early and late bilinguals of European Portuguese and German to do a forward and backward translation task. A measure of language balance was calculated through the DIALANG test. Analyses included this factor along with the gender congruency between translations, the target language, and the AoA of both languages, among others. Results showed a GCE for European Portuguese that was independent of the AoA and greater the higher the language imbalance. We propose that changes in proficiency in any of the languages create situations of dependency between them which allow cross-linguistic gender interaction to occur and effects to emerge depending on gender transparency.

Bilingualism has been shown to contribute to increased resilience against cognitive aging. One of the key brain structures linked to memory and dementia symptom onset, the hippocampus, has been observed to adapt in response to bilingual experience – at least in healthy individuals. However, in the context of neurodegenerative pathology, it is yet unclear what role previous bilingual experience might have in terms of sustaining integrity of this structure or related behavioral correlates. The present study adds to the limited cohort of research on the effects of bilingualism on neurocognitive outcomes in Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) using structural brain data. We investigate whether bilingual language experience (operationalized as language entropy) results in graded neurocognitive adaptations within a cohort of bilinguals diagnosed with MCI. Results reveal a non-linear effect of bilingual language entropy on hippocampal volume, although they do not predict episodic memory performance, nor age of MCI diagnosis.

When bilinguals switch between their two languages, they often alternate between words whose formation rules in one language are different from the other (e.g., a noun-verb compound in one language may be a verb-noun compound in another language). In this study, we analyze behavioral performance and electrophysiological activity to examine the effects of morphological configuration on language control during production and comprehension. Chinese–English bilinguals completed a joint naming-listening task involving cued language switching. The findings showed differential effects of morphological configuration on language production and comprehension. In production, morphological configuration was processed sequentially, suggesting that bilingual production may be a combination of sequential processing and inhibition of morphological levels and language interference. In comprehension, however, bottom-up control processes appear to mask the influence of sequential processing on language switching. Together, these findings underscore differential functionalities of language control in speaking and listening.

Language mixing is a common feature of many bilingually-raised children's input. Yet how it is related to their language development remains an open question. The current study investigated mixed-language input indexed by observed (30-second segment) counts and proportions in day-long recordings as well as parent-reported scores, in relation to infant vocal activeness (i.e., volubility) when infants were 10 and 18 months old. Results suggested infants who received a higher score or proportion of mixed input in one-on-one social contexts were less voluble. However, within contexts involving language mixing, infants who heard more words were also the ones who produced more vocalizations. These divergent associations between mixed input and infant vocal development point for a need to better understand the causal factors that drive these associations.

The Moral Foreign Language Effect (MFLE) is characterized by increased utilitarian decision-making when bilinguals respond to moral dilemmas in their foreign language. While previous research has given us a better understanding of this phenomenon, few studies have investigated how foreign language experience influences the MFLE. The present study investigated whether differences in foreign language proficiency, immersion, or dominance modulated the emergence of the MFLE. Mandarin–English bilingual young adults responded to a series of moral dilemmas in either their native or foreign language. Participants also provided ratings of permissibility and distress after reading each dilemma. We report a dilemma-specific MFLE that was modulated by differences in foreign language experience. Most significant was the observation that separable dimensions of foreign language experience interact when modulating the MFLE in a manner that is dilemma-specific. These findings emphasize the importance of considering differences in foreign language experience across multiple dimensions when investigating the MFLE.

The umbrella term cognitive reserve-enhancing factors refers to those experiential and lifestyle factors (such as intellectual activities, regular physical exercise, healthy nutrition, educational attainment, etc.) that may help individuals to compensate for age-related neural deterioration, thus enabling them to maintain relatively stable cognitive functioning during senescence. In the last 10 years, mounting evidence has shown that speaking a second language is a powerful cognitive reserve contributor, which could mitigate the consequences of healthy aging and contribute to the delay of dementia onset. In this piece, we argue that bilingualism may play a unique role among the well-known cognitive reserve-enhancing factors, thus contributing to the achievement of successful aging in a distinctive fashion. After reviewing behavioral and neuroimaging evidence for bilingualism-induced protection against healthy and pathological cognitive aging, we discuss theoretical reasons and experimental findings supporting the view that bilingualism should be granted an individual spot among reserve-enhancing life experiences.

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.

Most cognate research suggests facilitation effects in picture naming, but how these effects manifest in bilinguals after brain damage remains unclear. Additionally, whether this effect is captured in clinical measures is largely unknown. Using data from the Boston Naming Test, we examined the naming of cognates and noncognates, the extent of cognate facilitation produced, and the individual differences in bilingual language experience associated with naming outcomes in forty Spanish–English bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA) relative to thirty-one Spanish–English healthy bilinguals (HB). Results suggest that naming performance in L1 and L2 in both groups is modulated by lexical frequency, bilingual language experience, and by language impairment in BPWA. Although the two groups showed similarities, they deviated in benefit drawn from the extent of phoneme/grapheme overlap in cognate items. HB showed an association between cognate facilitation and bilingual language experience, while cognate facilitation in BPWA was only associated with L2 language impairment.

Research examining the cognitive consequences of bilingualism has increasingly relied on continuous measures to capture the degree and nature of bilingual experience, using such variables as proficiency, age of acquisition, and language environments. One such measure, language entropy, indexes the social diversity of contexts in which each language is used. The construct was developed in a particular bilingual context, Montréal, Canada. The present study investigated the extent to which it also applies to a context in which social language use is substantially different from that of Montréal – namely, Toronto, Canada. Following the procedures in the original study, participants were assigned an entropy score and performed the AX-Continuous Performance Task (AX-CPT). Performance was associated with self-rated language proficiency, but unlike the results from Montréal, was not associated with entropy scores. Therefore, differences in the language context influence whether language entropy is related to behavioral performance on a cognitive task.

We investigate the role of awareness in learning non-salient grammar features in a second language during oral interaction. We conducted a learning experiment during which forty-eight adult Dutch-speaking advanced learners of German and a native German-speaking experimenter engaged in a scripted oral dialogue game. The experimenter and learner in turn produced sentences based on pictures eliciting German strong verbs with stem-vowel alternations, a morphosyntactic feature that represents a persistent learning difficulty. While learners in the implicit condition were merely instructed to focus on sentence meaning, learners in the explicit condition were encouraged to also pay attention to and learn from the target structure in the experimenter's input. Although the explicit group achieved higher accuracy scores overall, both groups had similar (absolute) learning gains, showing that oral input provided during interactive exchanges can lead to substantial learning not only under explicit, learning-targeted conditions, but also without an explicit directive to learn.

Bilingualism is thought to confer advantages in executive functioning, thereby contributing to cognitive reserve and a later age of dementia symptom onset. While the relation between bilingualism and age of onset has been explored in Alzheimer's dementia, there are few studies examining bilingualism as a contributor to cognitive reserve in frontotemporal dementia (FTD). In line with previous findings, we hypothesized that bilinguals with behavioral variant FTD would be older at symptom onset compared to monolinguals, but that no such effect would be found in patients with nonfluent/agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia (PPA) or semantic variant PPA. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found no significant difference in age at symptom onset between monolingual and bilingual speakers within any of the FTD variants, and there were no notable differences on neuropsychological measures. Overall, our results do not support a protective effect of bilingualism in patients with FTD-spectrum disease in a U.S. based cohort.

Since globalization, using second languages (L2) to make decisions about future is more common than ever. In this study, we tested the merged effect of two language features, i.e., the future-time reference (FTR) and L2, on intertemporal decision and its indirect mediators, future orientation, and subjective future perception. As a pair of languages with different FTR, English (strong-FTR) has a clear grammatical separation between present and future, while Chinese (weak-FTR) does not. Here, Chinese first language (L1) speakers made intertemporal decisions using either Chinese (L1) or English (L2). Across three studies (N = 1022) and an internal meta-analysis, we found that using a strong-FTR L2 did not change participants’ intertemporal preference but did reduce their future orientation. These findings highlight a holistic perspective merging language features, outcome variables and measurement methods. These findings also imply a need for caution to use second language as nudge strategy in intertemporal decision-making.

Code-switching, switching between different languages within the same conversation, is a prominent feature in bilingual communication. This study aimed to elucidate to what extent the linguistic abilities and age of dual-language-learning preschoolers influence the frequency and purposes of code-switching (compensatory, to bridge linguistic gaps; preferential, to express content as fluently as possible; pragmatic, to phrase something appropriately for the situation). Parental code-switching ratings of 101 German/French–Turkish/Italian dual-language learners aged 32–78 months were analyzed. Generalized linear mixed models revealed positive but no negative effects of societal- and heritage-language skills on children's code-switching frequencies independent of switching purposes and with no evidence of age effects. Hence, code-switching across the preschool age mainly reflects high linguistic competences. Models with linguistically and psychometrically parallelized language scores indicated a strong switching tendency toward the societal language when proficiency in both languages is high, and away from the societal language when language proficiencies are low.

Bilingual and monolingual children might have different styles of using multimodal language. This study investigates speech disfluency and gesture production of 5- and 7-year-old Turkish monolingual (N = 61) and Turkish–English bilingual children (N = 51). We examined monolinguals’ Turkish narratives and bilinguals’ Turkish and English narratives. Results indicated that bilinguals were more disfluent than monolinguals, particularly for silent and filled (e.g., umm) pauses. Bilinguals used silent pauses and repetitions (e.g., cat cat) more frequently in English than in Turkish. Gesture use was comparable across language and age groups, except for iconic gestures. Monolinguals produced more iconic gestures than bilinguals. Children's overall gesture frequency predicted disfluency rates only in Turkish. Different gesture types might be orchestrated in the multimodal system, contributing to narrative fluency. The use of disfluency and gesture types might provide insight into bilingual and monolingual children's language development and communication strategies.

Correctly spelling an English word requires a high-quality orthographic representation. When faced with spelling a complex word without a high-quality representation, spellers often rely on other knowledge sources (e.g., incomplete stored orthographic forms, phonological to orthographic relationships) to spell it. For bilinguals, another potentially facilitative source is knowledge of a word's lexical and sublexical representations in another language. In the current study we considered simultaneous effects of word-level (e.g., frequency, cognate status) and person-level (e.g., English spelling skill, prompting, bilingual status) predictors on college students’ complex English word spelling. Monolinguals (English; n = 42) significantly outperformed bilinguals (Spanish and English; n = 76) on non-cognate spelling; no group differences emerged for cognate spelling accuracy. Within bilinguals, significantly higher spelling performance on cognates compared to non-cognates suggests cognate facilitation, with no prompting effects. Findings expand an interdisciplinary framework of understanding bilinguals’ activation and use of cross-linguistic representations in spelling.

Earlier acquisition of English is associated with better academic performance for dual language learners (DLLs), but large-scale, prospective, longitudinal studies examining how trajectories for English acquisition relate to school-based outcomes, accounting for relevant covariates, are rare. We explored how the grade in which DLLs (N = 17,548; 47% female; 80% free/reduced-price lunch; 86% Latino, 10% Black, and 4% White/Other) acquire English proficiency, defined by the school district, relates to academic outcomes (grade retention, GPA, reading and math test scores) in 5th grade, controlling for gender, ethnicity, poverty, and school readiness skills at age 4. Earlier acquisition of English, especially before 2nd grade, predicted better performance on each 5th grade outcome. Earlier proficiency in English was even more important for 5th grade outcomes for those with initially high cognitive skills, Latino/Hispanic DLLs (compared to Black DLLs), and those not in poverty. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

While research in heritage language phonology has found that transfer from the majority language can lead to divergent attainment in adult heritage language grammars, the extent to which language transfer develops during a heritage speaker's lifespan is understudied. To explore such cross-linguistic transfer, I examine the rate of glottalization between consonant-to-vowel sequences at word junctures produced by child and adult Spanish heritage speakers (i.e., HSs) in both languages. My results show that, in Spanish, child HSs produce greater rates of vowel-initial glottal phonation than their age-matched monolingually-raised Spanish counterparts, suggesting that the Spanish child HSs’ grammars are more permeable to transfer than those of the adult HSs. In English, child and adult HSs show similarly low rates of glottal phonation when compared to their age-matched monolingually-raised English speakers’ counterparts. The findings for English can be explained by either an account of transfer at the individual level or the community level.

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.