A number of recent studies demonstrate that bilinguals with languages that differ in grammatical and lexical categories may shift their cognitive representation of those categories towards that of monolingual speakers of their second language. The current paper extended that investigation to the domain of colour in Greek–English bilinguals with different levels of bilingualism, and English monolinguals. Greek differentiates the blue region of colour space into a darker shade called ble and a lighter shade called ghalazio. Results showed a semantic shift of category prototypes with level of bilingualism and acculturation, while the way bilinguals judged the perceptual similarity between within- and cross-category stimulus pairs depended strongly on the availability of the relevant colour terms in semantic memory, and the amount of time spent in the L2-speaking country. These results suggest that cognition is tightly linked to semantic memory for specific linguistic categories, and to cultural immersion in the L2-speaking country.

Dutch–English participants named words and nonwords with a between-language phonologically inconsistent rime, e.g., GREED and PREED, and control words with a language-typical rime, e.g., GROAN, in a monolingual stimulus list or in a mixed list containing Dutch words. Inconsistent items had longer latencies and more errors than typical items in the mixed lists but not in the pure list. The consistency effect depended on word frequency, but not on language membership, lexicality, or instruction. Instruction did affect the relative speed and number of errors in the two languages. The consistency effect is the consequence of the simultaneous activation of two sublexical codes in the bilinguals' two languages and its size depends on the activation rate of the associated lexical representations (high-frequency words versus low-frequency words and nonwords) and on the decision criteria that monitor the response conflict at the decision level: the timing for responding (time criterion) in each language depends on the composition of the stimulus list and the likelihood of responses in either language.

Using a self-paced reading task, the present study investigates how highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German with English as their native language process unambiguous wh-subject-extractions and wh-object-extractions in German. Previous monolingual research has shown that English and German exhibit different processing preferences for the type of wh-question under investigation, due in part to the robust case-marking system in German – a morphosyntactic feature that is largely absent in English (e.g., Juffs and Harrington, 1995; Fanselow, Kliegl and Schlesewsky 1999; Meng and Bader, 2000; Juffs, 2005). The results revealed that the L2 German speakers utilized case-marking information and exhibited a subject-preference similar to German native speakers. These findings are discussed in light of relevant research regarding the ability of L2 speakers to adopt native-like processing strategies in their L2.

Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds “different” (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish through analyses of spoken corpora collected in the bilingual Turkish community in the Netherlands and in a monolingual community in Turkey. The analyses reveal that at the current stage of contact, NL-Turkish is not copying Dutch syntax as such, but rather translates lexically complex individual units into Turkish. Perceived semantic equivalence between Dutch units and their Turkish equivalents plays a crucial role in this translation process. Counter to expectations, the TR-Turkish data also contained unconventional units, though they differed in type, and were much less frequent than those in NL-Turkish. We conclude that synchronic variation in individual NL-Turkish units can contain the seeds of future syntactic change, which will only be visible after an increase in the type and token frequency of the changing units.

Two indices of automatic orthographic processing, the word and pseudoword superiority effects, were explored in native Italian speakers familiar with English (late learners) and native English-speaking controls unfamiliar with Italian. Participants performed a forced-choice letter identification task with five categories of words: Italian words and pseudowords, English words and pseudowords, and nonwords. Native Italian speakers showed superiority effects for both languages, whereas English-speaking controls showed superiority effects only for English. These results suggest that orthographic processing can become automatic with extensive training in late bilinguals.

The present paper summarizes research showing that bilingualism affects linguistic and cognitive performance across the lifespan. The effect on linguistic performance is generally seen as a deficit in which bilingual children control a smaller vocabulary than their monolingual peers and bilingual adults perform more poorly on rapid lexical retrieval tasks. The effect on cognitive performance is to enhance executive functioning and to protect against the decline of executive control in aging. These effects interact to produce a complex pattern regarding the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Memory tasks based primarily on verbal recall are performed more poorly by bilinguals but memory tasks based primarily on executive control are performed better by bilinguals. Speculations regarding the mechanism responsible for these effects are described.

Where do the two languages of the bilingual child interact? The literature has debated whether bilingual children have delays in the acquisition of direct objects. The variety of methods and languages involved have prevented clear conclusions. In a transitivity-based approach, null objects are a default structural possibility, present in all languages. Since the computation of lexical and syntactic transitivity depends on lexical acquisition, we propose a default retention hypothesis, predicting that bilingual children retain default structures for aspects of syntactic development specifically linked to lexical development (such as objects). Children acquiring French (aged 3;0–4;2, N = 34) in a monolingual context and a French/English bilingual context participated in a study eliciting optional and obligatory direct objects. The results show significant differences between the rates of omissions in the two groups for both types of objects. We consider two models of how the bilingual lexicon may determine the timetable of development of transitivity.

Previous studies have found that proficiency in a second language affects how the meanings of words are accessed. Support for this hypothesis is based on data from explicit memory tasks with bilingual participants who know two languages that are relatively similar phonologically and orthographically (e.g., Dutch–English, French–English). The present study tested this hypothesis with Chinese–English bilinguals using an implicit memory task – the cross-language repetition priming paradigm. Consistent with the result of Zeelenberg, R. and Pecher, D. (2003), we obtained reliable effects of long-term cross-language repetition priming using a conceptual implicit memory task. Overall, the four experiments support the Revised Hierarchical Model as they demonstrate that low fluency bilinguals can only access the conceptual representation of the second language via the lexical representation of the first language.

As Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (BLC) enters its 12th year of publication, we the editors of the journal are pleased to report to the BLC readers that the state of the journal is strong.