This study investigated the encoding strategies employed by Chinese and English language users when recalling sequences of pictured objects. The working memory performance of native English participants (n = 14) and Chinese speakers of English as a second language (Chinese ESL; n = 14) was compared using serial recall of visually-presented pictures of familiar objects with three conditions: (i) phonologically and visually distinct, (ii) phonologically similar and visually distinct, and (iii) phonologically distinct and visually similar. Digit span, visual pattern span and articulation rate were also measured. Results indicated that whilst English participants were affected by the phonological but not the visual similarity of items, the performance of Chinese ESL participants was comparable across all three conditions. No significant differences in digit span, visual memory or articulation rate were found between groups. These results are discussed in the light of our understanding of the use of cognitive resources in short-term memory in users of diverse orthographies.

This study examines the motion lexicon in narratives elicited from Russian–English bilinguals. Lexical choices made by the participants are compared to those made by native speakers of Russian and English in narratives elicited by the same stimuli. The analysis of bilinguals’ narratives shows that lexicalization of motion is not subject to L2 influence in these bilinguals. A few instances of L2 influence on L1 uncovered in the data are used to discuss the forms L1 attrition might take in the Russian motion lexicon.

The apparent optionality in the use of null and overt pronominal subjects and the apparently free word order or distribution of preverbal and postverbal subjects in Spanish obey a number of discourse–pragmatic constraints which play an important role in Spanish L2 subject development. Although research on subject properties at the syntax–discourse interface has been conducted in adult L2A and bilingual L1A, child L2A has not been extensively explored in this respect. This paper explores the L2 development of syntactic and discourse properties of subjects by British child L2 learners of Spanish in the context of a Spanish immersion school and in three different age groups, namely five-, ten- and seventeen-year-old children whose age of first exposure was at four years old, and in three corresponding control groups. Research is carried out by means of grammaticality and preference judgment experimental tasks and results suggest that children can indeed acquire the syntactic properties of Spanish subjects, although not fully in the case of the first two age groups, while the acquisition of discourse properties seems to be delayed and remains problematic even for the older/more advanced group, as has been suggested for adult L2 learners.

If access to the bilingual lexicon takes place in a language independent way, monolingual repetition and masked form priming accounts should be directly applicable to bilinguals. We tested such an account (Grainger and Jacobs, 1999) and extended it to explain bilingual effects from L2 to L1. Dutch–English bilinguals made a lexical decision on a Dutch target word preceded by a briefly presented word or nonword prime from Dutch (L1; Exp. 1) or English (L2; Exp. 2). The prime was an orthographically related neighbor of the target (e.g., zwaar–ZWAAN or spoon–SPION) or unrelated (e.g., thuis–ZWAAN or mouse–SPION). On their first presentation, responses to L1 word targets were non-significantly slowed relative to unrelated primes following both L1 and L2 related word primes. Upon target repetition, all effects turned into facilitation. Stable facilitation effects were also found when word targets were preceded by related nonwords derived from Dutch or English words. Simulations by the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (BIA+) model account for the major effects within and across languages.

For bilinguals born in an English-speaking country or who arrive at a young age, English (L2) often becomes their dominant language by adulthood. This study examines whether such adult bilinguals show equivalent performance to monolingual English native speakers on three English auditory processing tasks: phonemic awareness, spelling-to-dictation and auditory comprehension. The study contrasts three bilingual language groups differing in their L1: morphosyllabic/logographic L1 (Cantonese), morphosyllabic/alphabetic (Vietnamese) L1 and non-morphosyllabic/alphabetic L1 (Other). Particularly on the tasks that involved nonwords, the morphosyllabic bilingual groups performed most poorly, suggesting an effect of L1 phonological structure on English processing despite L1 having become subordinate to L2. The results indicate that even when a bilingual is born, raised and educated in their L2 environment, native equivalence in L2 is not assured.

The Editors and members of the Editorial Board wish to thank the following guest consultants for having reviewed manuscripts submitted to the journal in 2009.

This study provides an account for a long-term selective loss of L1 (Russian) morpho-syntactic and content components in early immigrants to the U.S. The analysis of naturally occurring data is carried out from the perspective of two theoretical approaches – three models developed within language contact (Myers-Scotton 2002, 2005) and the Activation Threshold hypothesis as a component of a neurolinguistic approach to bilingualism (Paradis, 2004, 2007). The results show that the language contact approach is useful in identifying morpheme types that are most vulnerable to attrition. The second approach helps explain the differential rate of loss of content morphemes in a variety of topics and account for variability in the rate of attrition of late system morphemes through frequency factors. The study demonstrates that by crossing the boundaries of one theory and one view of language researchers can achieve a stronger explanatory power and identify the common and complementary features that both models provide.

The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) of bilingual language processing dominates current thinking on bilingual language processing. Recently, basic tenets of the model have been called into question. First, there is little evidence for separate lexicons. Second, there is little evidence for language selective access. Third, the inclusion of excitatory connections between translation equivalents at the lexical level is likely to impede word recognition. Fourth, the connections between L2 words and their meanings are stronger than proposed in RHM. And finally, there is good evidence to make a distinction between language-dependent and language-independent semantic features. It is argued that the Revised Hierarchical Model cannot easily be adapted to incorporate these challenges and that a more fruitful way forward is to start from existing computational models of monolingual language processing and see how they can be adapted for bilingual input and output, as has been done in the Bilingual Interactive Activation model.

This study investigates how the dominant language of Korean heritage speakers (English) influences Korean (minority language) in the domain of binding interpretations by comparing the performance of Korean immigrants in English dominant context with that of incomplete learners of Korean and L2 learners of Korean. Four groups (10 Korean immigrants, 17 simultaneous bilinguals, 14 late L2 learners, and 30 Korean native speakers) were tested. Differences between English and Korean in Governing Category and structural constraints were tested through a Truth Value Judgment Task with stories. Overall results showed that Korean immigrants (attriters) did not differ from Korean controls, while simultaneous bilinguals (incomplete learners) and late L2 learners of Korean showed behavior different from Korean control when two languages were different in their binding properties.

Brysbaert and Duyck (this issue) suggest that it is time to abandon the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994) in favor of connectionist models such as BIA+ (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) that more accurately account for the recent evidence on non-selective access in bilingual word recognition. In this brief response, we first review the history of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM), consider the set of issues that it was proposed to address and then evaluate the evidence that supports and fails to support the initial claims of the model. Although fifteen years of new research findings require a number of revisions to the RHM, we argue that the central issues to which the model was addressed, the way in which new lexical forms are mapped to meaning and the consequence of language learning history for lexical processing, cannot be accounted for solely within models of word recognition.

This study examines L1–L2 interaction in semantic categorization in early and late L2 learners. Word categories that overlapped but were not identical in Arabic and English were tested. Words always showed a ‘wider’ range of application in one language, ‘narrower’ in the other. Three types of categories – ‘classical’, ‘radial’, and ‘homophones’ – were examined. Monolingual Arabic, monolingual English, early bilingual, and late bilingual speakers were tested for their understanding of the Arabic or English words. Early bilinguals’ semantic structure is affected in both directions, late bilinguals’ only in the direction of L1 to L2. Classical categories were most vulnerable to inter-language influence, whereas homophones were least vulnerable. The discussion addresses a developmental model of semantic interaction in early and late bilingual learners.

We investigated the consequences of bilingualism for verbal fluency by comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, and dominant versus non-dominant-language fluency. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced fewer correct responses, slower first response times and proportionally delayed retrieval, relative to monolinguals. In Experiment 2, similar results were obtained comparing the dominant to the non-dominant languages within bilinguals. Additionally, bilinguals produced significantly lower-frequency words and a greater proportion of cognate responses than monolinguals, and bilinguals produced more cross-language intrusion errors when speaking the non-dominant language, but almost no such intrusions when speaking the dominant language. These results support an analogy between bilingualism and dual-task effects (Rohrer et al., 1995), implying a role for between-language interference in explaining the bilingual fluency disadvantage, and suggest that bilingual fluency will be maximized under testing conditions that minimize such interference. More generally, the findings suggest a role for selection by competition in language production, and that such competition is more influential in relatively unconstrained production tasks.

The Editors and members of the Editorial Board wish to thank the following guest consultants for having reviewed manuscripts submitted to the journal this past year.

This study investigated the possibility that lifelong bilingualism may lead to enhanced efficiency in the ability to shift between mental sets. We compared the performance of monolingual and fluent bilingual college students in a task-switching paradigm. Bilinguals incurred reduced switching costs in the task-switching paradigm when compared with monolinguals, suggesting that lifelong experience in switching between languages may contribute to increased efficiency in the ability to shift flexibly between mental sets. On the other hand, bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the differential cost of performing mixed-task as opposed to single-task blocks. Together, these results indicate that bilingual advantages in executive function most likely extend beyond inhibition of competing responses, and encompass flexible mental shifting as well.

In this reply to Kroll, Van Hell, Tokowicz and Green (this issue) we present an analysis of the citations made to the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM). This gives us a quantitative summary of the current use of the RHM, showing that RHM has been used equally often to guide research in word recognition as in word production. We also question the claim that Brysbaert and Duyck's (this issue) focus on word recognition leaves RHM unscathed for the explanation of word production and the interactions between lexical and conceptual representations. For these research topics too, we feel that more progress will be made by adapting computational monolingual models to the bilingual situation rather than by trying to understand the findings from the RHM framework.

The present study investigates the syntactic competence of bilingual Portuguese–German returnees who have lost regular contact with their L2 (German). The main criterion which distinguishes the participants is the age of input loss. This allows their division into two main groups: speakers who lost German input during early childhood (between ages seven and ten) and speakers who were eleven or older when they moved away from the German environment. Focusing on verb placement in main and embedded clauses, the available data show strong evidence of the existence of a stabilization phase following the acquisition period. The speakers who lost L2 input earlier than age eleven show significantly more syntactic deficits than the other speakers. However, the observed attrition effects seem to be the result of insufficient L2 activation, rather than the expression of undergoing competence loss.

This paper explores whether the poor mastery of morphosyntax exhibited by second language (L2) learners can be tied to difficulties with non-syntactic processing. Specifically, we examine whether problems with English regular and irregular past tense are related to poor L2 phonological ability and lexical access, respectively. In Experiment 1, L2 learners showed poorer past tense mastery than native English speakers in grammaticality judgment and production tasks. L2 phonological ability was positively correlated with correct performance on regular verbs and negatively with unmarked production. L2 lexical access was positively correlated with correct performance on irregular verbs, and negatively with overregularization production. Experiment 2 simulated these difficulties in native English speakers by placing them under phonological processing (noise) or lexical access (deadline) stress. Noise selectively impacted regular verbs in grammaticality judgment but impacted all verb types in production. Deadline pressure impacted irregular verbs while sparing regular verbs across both tasks. Thus, non-syntactic processing difficulties can have specific impacts on morphosyntactic performance in both non-native and native English speakers.