This study investigated whether lifelong bilingualism can be associated with enhanced executive control, particularly mental flexibility, and with a modulation of an age-related decline in these functions. We compared performance of middle-aged and elderly speakers of German and bilingual speakers of Dutch and Frisian in a cued task-switching paradigm. All bilinguals were fluent in the same, closely-related language pairs. Bilinguals incurred significantly lower switching costs than monolinguals, and elderly bilinguals were less affected by an age-related increase in switching costs than monolinguals. Bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the size of the mixing costs. Our findings suggest that lifelong bilingualism correlates with enhanced ability to shift between mental sets, as well as increased resistance to proactive interference. The fact that we found significant group differences – while some previous studies did not – may be attributable to the choice of our task and to the cognateness of the languages involved.

This study assesses the impact of internal and external factors on very young EFL learners in an instructional setting. 71 child English learners in China (onset age: 2;0 - 5;6) were involved: their receptive vocabulary, productive vocabulary and receptive grammar were taken as outcome variables, and age of onset, short-term memory, nonverbal intelligence, English input quantity and quality, English use, and maternal English level were taken as predictive variables. Multiple regression analyses, verified by Bayes factor comparisons, revealed that the total amount of school input and home English media environment were significant predictors for all of three aspects of English proficiency, with each aspect having different additional significant predictors. Both internal factors (e.g., age of onset) and external factors (e.g., English input quantity) played an important role, but in contrast to similar studies (e.g., Paradis, 2011) focusing on a L2 naturalistic setting, external factors explained more variance of English proficiency measures.

While research on third language (L3) and multilingualism has recently shown remarkable growth, the fundamental question of what makes trilingualism special compared to bilingualism, and indeed monolingualism, continues to be evaded. In this contribution we consider whether there is such a thing as a true monolingual, and if there is a difference between dialects, styles, registers and languages. While linguistic and psycholinguistic studies suggest differences in the processing of a third, compared to the first or second language, neurolinguistic research has shown that generally the same areas of the brain are activated during language use in proficient multilinguals. It is concluded that while from traditional linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives there are grounds to differentiate monolingual, bilingual and multilingual processing, a more dynamic perspective on language processing in which development over time is the core issue, leads to a questioning of the notion of languages as separate entities in the brain.

Weinreich (1953) distinguished three types of bilingualism: the compound, the coordinate, and the subordinative. In this article, we use his partition to describe the effects of a small typological distance on the organization of the bilingual lexicon. In order to do so, two relatively closely related varieties were used, standard Dutch and the dialect of Maastricht. Subjects had to carry out an auditory lexical decision task using the repetition priming paradigm. Stimuli under investigation were cognates and noncognates. There were two age groups (13 and 17 years old) and two language backgrounds (standard Dutch and Maastricht dialect). The results indicated no differences depending on age. With regard to language background, no interlingual repetition priming was found for the dialect speakers. However, in contrast with earlier findings on visual repetition priming, there were interlingual repetition effects not only for the cognates, but also for the noncognates when the standard speakers were concerned. Therefore, we concluded that, at least in the auditory modality, the dialect speakers in question are coordinate bilinguals and the standard speakers are subordinative bilinguals. Finally, it is shown that Weinreich's model in his pure form leads to unexplainable processes in language acquisition. For that reason, his distinctions are incorporated into the lexico-semantic model of Levelt (1989).

Compared to research on language acquisition, research on the maintenance and loss of language skills is a relatively recent development. There is, of course, a longstanding sociolinguistic tradition of research on language shift, but work in the field of attrition really started in the US in the late 1970s (Lambert and Freed 1982). Since then, research on language attrition has grown rapidly in different countries, as is witnessed by special issues devoted to the topic in the journals Applied Psycholinguistics in 1986, ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics in 1989 and Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 1989, as well as by three recent volumes: Weltens, de Bot and van Els (1986), Weltens (1989), and Seliger and Vago (1991).

In this article it is argued that language can be seen as a dynamic system, i.e. a set of variables that interact over time, and that language development can be seen as a dynamic process. Language development shows some of the core characteristics of dynamic systems: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, complete interconnectedness of subsystems, the emergence of attractor states in development over time and variation both in and among individuals. The application of tools and instruments developed for the study of dynamic systems in other disciplines calls for different approaches to research, which allow for the inclusion of both the social and the cognitive, and the interaction between systems. There is also a need for dense data bases on first and second language development to enhance our understanding of the fine-grained patterns of change over time. Dynamic Systems Theory is proposed as a candidate for an overall theory of language development.

Theory building is a dynamic process. Theories develop and grow, they are dependent on initial conditions, social interactions, variation, and they are stable for some time only to move on to the next phase. They can develop gradually, but a non-linear pattern is more common. Most importantly, theories develop over time. Theories are typically based on shared cognitions and they are situated. Written descriptions by definition reflect versions of the theory that are outdated the moment they are in print, though some of the core assumptions may be more stable than other, more peripheral ones. All of this very much applies to the present discussion of our paper on a DST approach to SLA. Inevitably, we, and probably most of the commentators, will already have moved on in our thinking about DST and SLA by the time this comes into print. In particular with new approaches, we will see a great deal of variability: wild ideas flourish and the links between grand theoretical notions and empirical database to support them tend to be out of balance. That may be seen as a weakness, but it probably is an inevitable developmental stage in building a new theory, or, as in this case, the application from a theory developed in other fields to SLA.

In this article the triggering hypothesis for codeswitching proposed by Michael Clyne is discussed and tested. According to this hypothesis, cognates can facilitate codeswitching of directly preceding or following words. It is argued that the triggering hypothesis in its original form is incompatible with language production models, as it assumes that language choice takes place at the surface structure of utterances, while in bilingual production models language choice takes place along with lemma selection. An adjusted version of the triggering hypothesis is proposed in which triggering takes place during lemma selection and the scope of triggering is extended to basic units in language production. Data from a Dutch–Moroccan Arabic corpus are used for a statistical test of the original and the adjusted triggering theory. The codeswitching patterns found in the data support part of the original triggering hypothesis, but they are best explained by the adjusted triggering theory.

This article addresses the relationship between two major terms, psycho-linguistics and applied linguistics, and in the process, explores key issues in multilingual processing. A straightforward definition of psycholinguistics is provided by Kess (1991:1): ‘The field of study concerned with psychological aspects of language studies.’ In the last decade, the definition has become more restricted, leaving out more social-psychological aspects like the study of attitudes in language use. Here, psycholinguistics will be further restricted to the study of processes of language production and perception (as opposed to acquisition and attrition).

A problem when reacting to a contribution as rich and as highly interesting as Pienemann's paper, is that it is much easier to react to what's not in it than to what is. An example is the relation between the theory proposed and the way linguistic knowledge is acquired: “[Processability theory] … is not designed to contribute anything to the question of the innate or learnt origin of linguistic knowledge or the inferential processes by which linguistic input is converted into linguistic knowledge.” It is not easy to interpret the full consequences of the model if we are not to take into account the inferential processes by which the learner adds new information to his/her system. Maybe here the dividing lines are drawn too strictly: if the hypothesis space of the learner is restricted by the procedures that can be applied, one wonders at what level in the cognitive system these restrictions are located. Does the conceptualizer already know what the system is capable of doing, or is it uninformed (as follows from a strict interpretation of Levelt's proposal of an incremental system without feedforward)? In the latter case, this would mean that the learners/speakers would still try to express their communicative intentions and only later on in the process would things go wrong, for example, because the S-procedure cannot be carried out.

Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate whether or not words from a first and more dominant language are activated during lexical access in a foreign and less dominant language. Native speakers of Dutch were instructed to name pictures in their foreign language English. Our experiments show that the Dutch name of a picture is activated during initial stages of the process of lexical in English as a foreign language. We conclude that bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their first language while naming pictures in a foreign language. The implications for bilingual speech production theories are discussed.

A major requirement for theory development in L2 vocabulary acquisition is an adequate model of L2 lexical organization and processing. At present, there is no widely accepted model of this kind, but recent research has demonstrated the potential usefulness of Levelt's (1989, 1993) L1 speech processing model (de Bot & Schreuder, 1993; Green, 1993; Poulisse, 1993). This paper explores the relevance of the model as adapted for L2 lexical processing of written texts, with particular attention to its mental lexicon components (concepts, lemmas, and lexemes) and organization. The model is first discussed in terms of its relevance to L2 lexical access, retrieval, and acquisition processes. Findings of an introspective L2 vocabulary study follow, detailing how university ESL learners reported dealing with unfamiliar words while carrying out L2 reading tasks. The information provided on their lexical inferencing strategy and varied knowledge sources used in the process provide support for the lexical components and organization proposed by Levelt. It is argued in this paper that the process of inferring the features of unknown words in a reading passage can be described in terms of lemma construction, as defined in the model.