The keynote article by Aneta Pavlenko provides a compelling framework for the mental representation of emotion concepts in the two languages of the bilingual (novice or expert), and this may very well be its most telling contribution to the literature. However, I would like to concentrate my remarks on the author's development of the notion of emotionality in the latter third of the paper. I do this, first, because it seems to me that the majority of our work on the bilingual emotion lexicon derives from studies that have been done in the absence of actual emotional experience, and, second, because I believe that the author's development of the concept of emotionality sets the agenda for the next stage of research in this field.

Do the lexical representations of the non-response language enter into lexical competition during speech production? This issue has been studied by means of the picture–word interference paradigm in which two paradoxical effects have been observed. The so-called CROSS-LANGUAGE IDENTITY EFFECT (Costa, Miozzo and Caramazza, 1999) has been taken as evidence against cross-linguistic lexical competition. In contrast, the so-called PHONO-TRANSLATION EFFECT (Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot and Schreuder, 1998) has been interpreted as revealing lexical competition across languages. In this article, we assess the reliability of these two effects by testing Spanish–Catalan highly-proficient bilinguals performing a Stroop task. The results of the experiment are clear: while the cross-language identity facilitation effect is reliably replicated, the phono-translation interference effect is absent from the Stroop task. From these results, we conclude that we should be cautious when drawing strong conclusions about the presence of competition across languages based on the phono-translation effect observed in the picture–word interference paradigm.

This article studies the acquisition of copulas by a Spanish–English bilingual between the ages of 1;6 and 3;0, examines the possibility of interlanguage influence, and considers the distributional frequencies of copular constructions in the speech of the child and in the language input from adults. The study is of interest because the bilingual child needs to acquire semantic and syntactic contrasts in Spanish that are not explicitly marked in English. This difference raises questions about the timing of acquisition of the Spanish copulas under pressure from a stronger language, in addition to the language-internal questions concerning the acquisition of the semantics and syntax of these verbs. The results show that copular constructions develop autonomously, but with a slight delay in the acquisition of estar interpreted as a possible type of influence from English. The distributional analysis reveals parallels between the child's and the adults' uses of copulas, thus supporting a process of acquisition guided by the nature of the interactions that the child enters into with the adults who surround him.

In her thought-provoking article, Aneta Pavlenko approaches emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon from an impressive number of different perspectives. This is particularly welcome, since most models of linguistic structure do not account for emotional meanings in a systematic way. One exception worth mentioning, however, is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1985/1994) with its broad division of functions into the textual, ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. Whereas the textual metafunction is concerned with the flow of information and the ideational with the construction of experience, the interpersonal function is concerned with interaction between people including the sharing of feelings. Recently, this last aspect has been developed more on the basis of SFL within Appraisal theory (Martin and White 2005), where attitudinal meanings are divided into Affect (the construal of emotion into the frame I feel (very) __), Judgment (social/moral evaluation of people) and Appreciation (aesthetic evaluation of things). The theory has primarily been applied to the development of the expression of feeling and evaluation in student writing in schools, based on qualitative analysis of corpora. The framework has also recently been applied to other languages than English as in Folkeryd (2006), who shows how the expression of affect and other evaluative resources are used in various story genres by Swedish students in grades 5, 8 and 11. The expression of attitudinal meanings turned out to be a problem characteristic of low-achieving students. This study includes bilingual students but they are not focused on in the published work.

In the present study, we explore whether multiple data sources may be more effective than single sources at predicting the words that language learners are likely to know. Second language researchers have hypothesized that there is a relationship between word frequency and the likelihood that words will be encountered or used by second language learners, but it is not yet clear how this relationship should be effectively measured. An analysis of word frequency measures showed that spoken language frequency alone may predict the occurrence of words in learner textbooks, but that multiple corpora as well as textbook status can improve predictions of learner usage.

Aneta Pavlenko (henceforth A.P.) is a pioneer in the study of “languages and emotion” in general and “emotions and bilingualism” in particular. If I voice in this commentary some disagreements, I do so in order to engage in a constructive discussion, conscious of how much she has done in this area, and also, of how much we share in our respective perspectives on emotion, languages, and bilingual lives.

Studies of copular forms are extremely relevant to issues in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics. Psychologists have recently argued that the most distinctive aspect of human language is its combinatorial nature (e.g., Gentner, 2003; Spelke, 2003). They argue that this linguistic component might be what separates human from animal cognition. As combinatorial elements, copular forms have no equal. However, as the quote from Bertrand Russell implies, copular forms are multi-dimensional and complex. A full understanding of their use, linguistic variation, acquisition, and relation to cognition is a formidable task. While other papers in this special-issue volume of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition will address the different syntactic and semantic functions carried by these forms, in this commentary, I will focus on the relation between the acquisition of copular forms and cognitive development, or more specifically on the development of categorization.

I would like to begin by thanking the editors of the journal, and in particular Carmen Silva-Corvalán, for inviting such a wonderful group of commentators, united in their commitment to spirited yet courteous academic debate and diverse in their academic allegiances, theories, and methodologies. I also thank the commentators for the kindness and generosity of their comments, which offered rich material for reflection. Reading the comments for the first time, I became concerned that a coherent response that addresses the Emotion Stroop Effect in the same breath as the textual explorations of the “third space” may be all but impossible. I thought about the resemblance between the academic enterprise and the phenomenon of bi- and multilingualism, with academic paradigms establishing their own regimes of truth and creating languages that are often mutually incomprehensible. For some, true answers can only come from quantifiable empirical data, others look for veracity in texts and personal testimonies. Some take for granted that “monolingual controls” are a necessary component of solid research on bilingualism, while others doubt the meaningfulness of such a comparison, reminding us that languages are artificial constructions (Makoni and Pennycook, 2007) and questioning the very existence of crosslinguistic influence (Hall, Cheng and Carlson, 2006). And so we proceed with our parallel lines of research inspired by similar questions about the human condition and yet carried out in ways so distinct as to be incompatible.

In some contact situations between Spanish and English there is an acceleration of the process of the extension of estar that may be due to lack of access to the formal written standard, features of English in particular or general processes of simplification that result from the cognitive demands of bilingualism (Silva-Corvalán, 1994). In our large-scale analysis of data from a contextualized preference task collected in four areas of the lberian Peninsula where Spanish is in contact with a regional language (Basque, Catalan, Galician and Valencian) and in monolingual regions of Spain, we identify differences in the numbers of unanimous responses, and frequency and predictors of estar selection across populations. We show that more frequent selection of estar is not a characteristic of all bilingual groups, and several linguistic predictors of estar are common to all groups. Additionally, we find that more frequent selection of estar occurs in some varieties even among bilinguals with ample access to the formal standard.

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalán, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages, while others (Thomason and Kaufman, 1988, p. 14) deem that “any linguistic feature can be transferred from any language to any other language”. Regardless of the differences of opinion on this issue, there is widespread recognition that the social context, including such features as the size and characteristics of the bilingual groups, the attitudes toward the languages spoken, and the intensity and duration of language contact, play an important role in determining the linguistic outcomes of language contact.

How does age of first bilingual language exposure affect reading development in children learning to read in both of their languages? Is there a reading advantage for monolingual English children who are educated in bilingual schools? We studied children (grades 2–3, ages 7–9) in bilingual Spanish–English schools who were either from Spanish-speaking homes (new to English) or English-speaking homes (new to Spanish), as compared with English-speaking children in monolingual English schools. An early age of first bilingual language exposure had a positive effect on reading, phonological awareness, and language competence in both languages: early bilinguals (age of first exposure 0–3 years) outperformed other bilingual groups (age of first exposure 3–6 years). Remarkably, schooling in two languages afforded children from monolingual English homes an advantage in phoneme awareness skills. Early bilingual exposure is best for dual language reading development, and it may afford such a powerful positive impact on reading and language development that it may possibly ameliorate the negative effect of low SES on literacy. Further, age of first bilingual exposure provides a new tool for evaluating whether a young bilingual has a reading problem versus whether he or she is a typically-developing dual-language learner.

The study argues that, in addition to advantages in conscious attention-demanding processing, bilinguals may also exhibit enhanced unconscious divergent thinking. To investigate this issue, the performance of Russian–English bilingual immigrants and English monolingual native speakers was compared on the Abbreviated Torrance Test for Adults, which is a traditional assessment tool of divergent thinking. The study reveals bilinguals' superiority on divergent thinking tasks that require the ability to simultaneously activate and process multiple unrelated concepts from distant categories. Divergent thinking was facilitated by bilinguals' proficiency in two languages, the age of acquisition of these languages and the length of exposure to the new cultural settings that accompanies the acquisition of a new language. A specific architecture of bilingual memory in which two lexicons are mutually linked to the shared conceptual system is theorized to facilitate the functioning of the language mediated concept activation, thereby encouraging bilinguals' divergent thinking performance.

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.

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repetition-priming effects (like the L1 group), but no priming for inflected and reduced priming for derived word forms. We argue that this striking contrast between L1 and L2 processing supports the view that adult L2 learners rely more on lexical storage and less on combinatorial processing of morphologically complex words than native speakers.

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.

In our research we addressed the question what the relationship is between phonological short-term and working memory capacity and performance in an end-of-year reading, writing, listening, speaking and use of English test. The participants of our study were 121 secondary school students aged 15–16 in the first intensive language training year of a bilingual education program in Hungary. The participants performed a non-word repetition test and took a Cambridge First Certificate Exam. Fifty students were also tested with a backward digit span test, measuring their working memory capacity. Our study indicates that phonological short-term memory capacity plays a different role in the case of beginners and pre-intermediate students in intensive language learning. The backward digit span test correlated very highly with the overall English language competence, as well as with reading, listening, speaking and use of English (vocabulary and grammar) test scores.