In their keynote article, Goldrick, Putnam and Schwarz (2016) present a computational account of code-mixing. Although they review literature on the co-activation of lexical representations and cognate facilitation effects in bilingual language processing, their model remains silent on how it interfaces with lexical factors, and how lexical factors impact code-switching. One such lexical factor is cognate status, which has been found to affect code-switching, as demonstrated in corpus analyses (e.g., Broersma & De Bot, 2006) and psycholinguistic experiments (Kootstra, Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2012). For example, using the structural priming technique to examine the role of lexical factors in code-switching, Kootstra et al. asked Dutch–English bilinguals to repeat a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then describe a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). They observed that bilinguals' tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was increased when the prime sentence and target picture contained cognates.

Research on the linguistic knowledge of heritage speakers has been concerned primarily with the advantages conferred by heritage language experience in production, perception, and (re)learning of the heritage language. Meanwhile, second-language speech research has begun to investigate potential benefits of first-language transfer in second-language performance. Bridging these two bodies of work, the current study examined the perceptual benefits of heritage language experience for heritage speakers of Korean in both the heritage language (Korean) and the dominant language (American English). It was hypothesized that, due to their early bilingual experience and the different nature of unreleased stops in Korean and American English, heritage speakers of Korean would show not only native-like perception of Korean unreleased stops, but also better-than-native perception of American English unreleased stops. Results of three perception experiments were consistent with this hypothesis, suggesting that benefits of early heritage language experience can extend well beyond the heritage language.

The current longitudinal study investigated the role of home language and outside home exposure in the development of Dutch and Frisian vocabulary by young bilinguals. Frisian is a minority language spoken in the north of the Netherlands. In three successive test rounds, 91 preschoolers were tested in receptive and productive vocabulary in both languages. Results showed a home language effect for Frisian receptive and productive vocabulary, and Dutch productive vocabulary, but not for Dutch receptive vocabulary. As for outside home exposure, an effect was found on the receptive vocabulary tests only. The results can be explained by the amount of L2-input that participants received. The Dutch input is higher for participants with Frisian as home language compared to the Frisian input for participants with Dutch as home language. The conclusions lead to further implications for language professionals working in language minority contexts.

The current study examined if bilingual advantages in cognitive control influence memory encoding during a divided attention task. Monolinguals, simultaneous bilinguals, and sequential bilinguals switched between classifying objects and words, then were tested for their recognition memory of stimuli previously seen during the classification task. Compared to bilingual groups, monolinguals made the most errors on the classification task and simultaneous bilinguals committed the fewest errors. On the memory task, however, no differences were found between the three language groups, but significant correlations were found between the number of errors during switch trials on the classification task and recognition memory for both target and non-target stimuli. For bilinguals, their age of second language acquisition partially accounted for the association between attentional control (number of switch errors) and subsequent memory for non-target stimuli only. These results contribute to our understanding of how individual differences in language acquisition influence interactions between cognitive domains.

We investigate the ‘gender-congruency’ effect during a spoken-word recognition task using the visual world paradigm. Eye movements of Italian–Spanish bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals were monitored while they viewed a pair of objects on a computer screen. Participants listened to instructions in Spanish (encuentra la bufanda / ‘find the scarf’) and clicked on the object named in the instruction. Grammatical gender of the objects’ name was manipulated so that pairs of objects had the same (congruent) or different (incongruent) gender in Italian, but gender in Spanish was always congruent. Results showed that bilinguals, but not monolinguals, looked at target objects less when they were incongruent in gender, suggesting a between-language gender competition effect. In addition, bilinguals looked at target objects more when the definite article in the spoken instructions provided a valid cue to anticipate its selection (different-gender condition). The temporal dynamics of gender processing and cross-language activation in bilinguals are discussed.

This study investigated the role of age-of-acquisition in determining whether young bilingual children show a pattern of L2/nonnative English, precocious BE acquisition, or whether they show the L1/native English pattern of synchronous acquisition of BE and inflectional morphology. Two groups of children with age-of-acquisition before or after 4;0 and equivalent exposure to L2 English were given production and grammaticality-judgement tasks. The children in both age-of-acquisition groups showed the precocious BE pattern, regardless of L1 background and on both tasks. We conclude that, for this aspect of morphosyntax, bilingual children who begin to learn English after age 3;0 are best characterized as child L2 rather than bilingual L1 learners.

The Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) model presented in the keynote article (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) constitutes a significant theoretical development, not only as a model of bilingual code-mixing, but also as a general framework that brings together symbolic grammars and graded representations. The authors are to be commended for successfully integrating a theory of grammatical knowledge with the voluminous research on lexical co-activation in bilinguals. It is, however, unfortunate that a certain conception of bilingualism was inherited from this latter research tradition, one in which the contrast between native and non-native language takes a back seat.

Behavioural studies investigating word processing in bilinguals generally report faster response times (RTs) for first (L1) than for second (L2) language words. To examine the locus of this language effect, this study used behavioural data and event-related potentials (ERPs) collected from bilinguals while performing a semantic categorisation task on visual word pairs. RTs revealed both language and semantic relatedness effects. Spatio-temporal analysis of ERP map series showed that the semantic effect was explained by a condition-specific map segment occurring during the N400 component. The language effect was primarily explained by a map segment that started at ~170 ms and covered the period of the P2 component, that was longer in L2 than in L1 and whose duration correlated with RTs. Source localisation showed that this early segment involved the bilateral occipito-temporal regions including the fusiform area. These findings indicate that ERPs differentiated L1 and L2 during early word recognition steps.

This experiment shows that recent experience in one language influences subsequent processing of the same word-forms in a different language. Dutch–English bilinguals read Dutch sentences containing Dutch–English cognates and interlingual homographs, which were presented again 16 minutes later in isolation in an English lexical decision task. Priming produced faster responses for the cognates but slower responses for the interlingual homographs. These results show that language switching can influence bilingual speakers at the level of individual words, and require models of bilingual word recognition (e.g., BIA+) to allow access to word meanings to be modulated by recent experience.

This paper reports on the comprehension of movement-derived structures by a Spanish-Basque bilingual with chronic Broca's aphasia. The study reveals a differential impairment which affects mostly Basque and a selective impairment in this language that affects only object questions and subject relatives. The impairment pattern observed is discussed in light of the predictions made by different representational and processing accounts for (monolingual as well as bilingual) Spanish and Basque agrammatism.

The asymmetry observed between the two languages suggests that the patient resorts to language-specific morpho-syntactic cues, which cannot be transferred from one language to the other because of the typological distance between Spanish and Basque. The data confirm results from previous studies showing that (major) typological distance hinders cross-language effects from arising in bilingual aphasia.

Auditory phonological processing skills are critical for successful reading development in English not only in native (L1) speakers but also in second language (L2) learners. However, the neural deficits of auditory phonological processing remain unknown in English-as-the-second-language (ESL) learners with reading difficulties. Here we investigated neural responses during spoken word rhyme judgments in typical and impaired ESL readers in China. The impaired readers showed comparable activation in the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG), but reduced activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left fusiform and reduced connectivity between the LSTG and left fusiform when compared to typical readers. These findings suggest that impaired ESL readers have relative intact representations but impaired manipulation of phonology and reduced or absent automatic access to orthographic representations. This is consistent with previous findings in native English speakers and suggests a common neural mechanism underlying English impairment across the L1 and L2 learners.

We asked whether children's well-known difficulties revising initial sentence processing commitments characterize the immature or the learning parser. Adult L2 speakers of English acted out temporarily ambiguous and unambiguous instructions. While online processing patterns indicate that L2 adults experienced garden-paths and were sensitive to referential information to a similar degree as native adults, their act-out patterns indicate increased difficulties revising initial interpretations, at rates similar to those observed for 5-year-old native children (e.g., Trueswell, Sekerina, Hill & Logrip, 1999). We propose that L2 learners’ difficulties with revision stem from increased recruitment of cognitive control networks during processing of a not fully proficient language, resulting in the reduced availability of cognitive control for parsing revisions.

The present study investigated anticipation processes in L2 speech comprehension. French–Spanish late bilinguals were presented with high-constrained Spanish sentences. ERPs were time-locked on the article preceding the critical noun, which was muted to avoid overlapping effects. Articles that mis-matched the gender of the expected nouns triggered a negativity. A subsequent lexical recognition task revealed that words expected from the context were (falsely) recognised significantly more often than unexpected words, even though all were muted. Overall, the results suggest that anticipation processes are at play during L2 speech processing, and allow creating a memory trace of a word prior to presentation.

Our keynote article “Coactivation in bilingual grammars: A computational account of code mixing” (Goldrick, Putnam & Schwarz) aimed to provide a framework that would begin to unify psycholinguistic and formal grammatical approaches to code mixing. We situated our account within a large body of psycholinguistic and phonetic evidence suggesting that, under many conditions, multiple representational elements simultaneously occupy (to varying degrees) a single position within a linguistic structure. The presence of such blends in multilingual cognition is not compatible with many formal grammatical approaches that assume mental representations are necessarily discrete.

This study analyzes gender assignment in Spanish–Basque mixed nominal constructions with nouns in Basque (a language that lacks gender) and determiners in Spanish (a language that marks gender) by using a multi-task approach: (i) naturalistic data, (ii) an elicitation task, and (iii) an auditory judgment task. Naturalistic data suggest cross-language effects under which a morphological marker of Basque (-a determiner) is interpreted as a morphophonological expression of gender marking in Spanish. A preference for feminine determiners was observed in the judgment task, which differs from the masculine default trend observed in Spanish–English bilinguals (Jake, Myers-Scotton & Gross, 2002). Our results point to feminine gender as default in Spanish–Basque mixed DPs, indicating that the resources that bilinguals use for gender assignment can be different from those of monolinguals. We argue that this is an outcome of interacting processes which take place at the interfaces (lexicon, phonology, morphosyntax) of both languages, resulting in cross-language effects.

This article was published in error in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18 (2), 304–323.

The publisher apologizes for this error.

Seminal research which indicates that bilingualism leads to enhanced executive control (Bialystok, Craik, Green & Gollan, 2009; Bialystok, Craik & Luk, 2012) has recently been challenged (de Bruin, Treccani & Della Sala, 2014; Hilchey & Klein, 2011; Paap & Greenberg, 2013). We suggest that this discrepancy in findings is attributable to differences between bilinguals. Although the present results showed no significant differences in executive control between the monolinguals and bilinguals, those bilinguals who used their L2 more frequently in their daily lives were significantly more likely to evidence enhanced executive control over those who rarely used their L2.

When do the gestures do and do not follow the patterns of the language one speaks? We examined this question by studying 10 Turkish-English bilingual adults (Turkish as L1) in comparison to 10 monolingual English and 10 monolingual Turkish adults as they described motion events either in speech with gesture (co-speech gesture) or only in gesture without speech (silent gesture). All speakers – monolingual and bilingual – showed cross-linguistic differences in co-speech gesture but not in silent gesture. Moreover, bilinguals followed L1 co-speech gesture patterns even when speaking L2, suggesting that acquisition of native-like gesture patterns does not co-occur with the acquisition of native-like speech patterns in bilinguals.

We recorded eye movements during natural reading to explore the influence of sentence context on bilingual word recognition. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals read sentences in English that biased either the English or the Spanish meaning of interlingual homographs. Shortly after encountering the homograph, the groups showed equivalent implausibility effects when its English meaning was incongruent with the preceding sentence context. No evidence for immediate homograph interference emerged during this period in the bilingual group. Only in later processing measures did group and congruency interact. Bilinguals may have initially accessed and selected the language appropriate meaning of the homograph to integrate into the sentence. Later, bilinguals accessed their first language lexicon and integrated the Spanish meaning into the sentence when semantically appropriate. Rather than always experiencing cross-language competition, proficient bilinguals may dynamically adapt to contextual cues and selectively access information associated with the contextually cued language under certain conditions.