The main aim of this article is to test hypotheses derived from the model for contact-induced language change as formulated in Thomason and Kaufman (1988 and Thomason (1998)). As the model correctly predicts the asymmetries between the mutual influences of the Germanic and the Romance varieties in Brussels and Strasbourg it is a very powerful tool for describing the contact patterns in these cities. The analysis shows that the contact patterns are very similar, both from a quantitative and from a qualitative point of view, despite important differences in the sociolinguistic situation of both cities. The striking similarities in the outcome of language contact seem to find a plausible explanation in the fact that the language contact situations in both cities are similar from a typological point of view: in each city a variety of French is in contact with a Germanic variety (Alsatian and Brussels Dutch). Thus, the claim of the article is that the structure of the languages plays a more prominent role in the outcome of language contact than the sociolinguistic history of the speakers.

This paper investigates “mixed” early two-word utterances by bilinguals, in order to determine whether function words match the language context less frequently than content words. Data collected in two language contexts from a child acquiring English and Spanish from birth were used to identify those two-word utterances occurring in the first two months of two-word utterances, between the ages of 1;7 and 1;9. Those utterances containing one word from each language, where one word was a function and the other a content word, were analysed quantitatively to determine whether the function word was more or less likely to match the context than the content word. The results showed that function words matched the context considerably less than content words. This finding is interpreted as suggesting that function words may not be treated as language-specific by early bilinguals, whereas content words are. It reinforces the significance of the well-established function/content distinction in language acquisition theory in a way which would not be possible with monolingual data.

In this paper we discuss three areas of development that have been shown to be fundamental to the acquisition of literacy. These areas are experience with stories and book reading, concepts of print, and phonological awareness. In each area, we review the research comparing the development of these skills by bilingual and monolingual children. In all three areas, research has been contradictory regarding whether or not bilingual children differ from their monolingual peers. We attempt to reconcile some of these diverse findings by identifying more specifically the effects that bilingualism has on children's early literacy development.

During early stages of second language acquisition adult learners make frequent errors of lexical form. An experiment was performed to examine this effect in the laboratory. More and less fluent bilinguals in English and Spanish performed a translation recognition task in which they decided whether the second of two words was the correct translation of the first. In the critical conditions of the experiment the words were not correct translation equivalents, but related by lexical form (e.g., man-hambre (hunger) instead of man-hombre (man)) or by meaning (e.g., man-mujer (woman) instead of man-hombre (man)). Less fluent participants suffered more interference for form-related than for semantically related words relative to unrelated controls, but the reverse pattern held for more fluent participants. The results support a progression from reliance on word form to reliance on meaning with increasing proficiency in the second language. The performance of the more fluent bilinguals further suggests that the ability to retrieve semantic information directly for second-language words can potentially override some of the costs associated with lexical competition in languages that access shared lexical features.

Cross-language priming effects using masked primes tend to be asymmetrical. Priming from L1 to L2 is strong, but priming from L2 to L1 is inconsistent and weak. Two kinds of explanations may explain this asymmetry. The representation hypothesis attributes the asymmetry to the different strength of connections between lexical items in the two languages. The processing hypothesis explains the asymmetry by emphasizing differences in processing speed or the general activation level of the two languages. In this study, three versions of the processing hypothesis were examined. Chinese–English bilinguals were tested with a masked priming paradigm on Chinese–English translation pairs in five experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated the asymmetrical pattern of cross-language priming. Experiments 3 to 5 examined three processing-related hypotheses by varying prime and target presentation conditions. The results showed that none of the three processing accounts provides a satisfactory explanation for the asymmetry. The findings are discussed in the context of current models of bilingual memory organization.