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This article investigates the narrative skills of children acquiring Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Producing a narrative requires vocabulary, the ability to form sentences, and cognitive skills to construct actions in a logical order for the recipient to understand the story. Research has shown that narrative skills are an excellent way of observing a child's language skills, for they reflect both grammatical language skills and the ability to use the language in situationally appropriate ways. This study was conducted using the FinSL Narrative Skills Production Test assessment to observe how narrative skills develop in children between the ages of 4 and 11 who acquire FinSL in their natural language environments. The results show that the narrative skills of children acquiring FinSL develop following the same guidelines found in other signed and spoken languages. Narrative structure and content increase with age., (© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press.)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with marked heterogeneity in executive function (EF) abilities. EF components including inhibition and shifting are related to ASD core symptoms such as perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behavior. Recent research suggests that multilingualism may have a beneficial impact on EF abilities, especially in children with ASD. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding the relationships between multilingualism, EF, and core symptoms in children with ASD. Here, we examined these associations in 7-12-year-old children with and without ASD (N = 116; 53 ASD, Mean age = 9.94 years). Results suggest that multilingual children have stronger parent-reported inhibition, shifting, and perspective-taking skills than monolingual children. Furthermore, we found a significant interaction between diagnosis and multilingual status on inhibition, such that the effects of multilingualism were stronger for children with ASD than typically developing (TD) children. Finally, we found indirect effects of multilingualism on perspective taking, social communication, and repetitive behaviors mediated by EF skills. These results demonstrate the supportive influences multilingual experience might have on bolstering EF and reducing ASD-related symptoms., (© 2024 The Author(s). Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

The standard explanation for bilingual effects on cognition is that an aspect of language processing transfers to nonverbal cognitive performance, leading to improvements in executive functioning. However, much evidence is incompatible with that view, and transfer across those domains seems unlikely. The present argument is that bilingual experience modifies cognition through an adaptation to the underlying attention system, making attention more efficient. 'Transfer' focuses on the overlap of specific processes, so task similarity predicts outcomes. By contrast, 'adaptation' focuses on recruitment of the modified resource, so the degree of attention required predicts outcome. In this view, bilinguals require less attentional effort than monolinguals for similar levels of performance, and outperform monolinguals on tasks with high attention demands regardless of task similarity., Competing Interests: Declaration of interests No interests are declared., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The repetition of a statement increases its credibility, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect. Here we tested whether the illusory truth effect persists across languages and scripts. In two experiments, Italian-English (n = 80) and Greek-English (n = 66), unbalanced bilinguals were exposed to 60 written unknown trivia statements in English. After a distractor math task, participants rated the truthfulness of the same 60 (repeated) statements and 60 new statements, which were presented either in the same language as in the exposure phase (English) or in a different language (Italian, Experiment 1, or Greek, Experiment 2). Response times were faster when information was repeated in the same language compared to a different language, suggesting increased processing fluency in the former than in the latter case. Truth ratings yielded an illusory truth effect: repeated statements were considered more truthful than new statements. Interestingly, the magnitude of the illusory truth effect remained regardless of whether the repetition was in the same or in a different language and persisted even when the different language condition also entailed a different script (Latin in exposure phase and Greek in repetition). The results suggest that the language of information presentation is not a critical factor to affect the illusory truth effect, despite the fact that repetition in the same language increases processing speed. We interpret our results in light of the referential theory (Unkelbach & Rom, Cognition 160: 110-126, 2017), attributing the illusory truth effect to conceptual fluency induced by the overlap of activated conceptual representations in bilingual memory., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

The current study focused on an understudied but most prominent bilingual population in the U.S. - heritage bilinguals. The current study combined data from eight MRI studies to examine the relationship between language experience and subcortical gray matter volume in 215 heritage Spanish-English bilinguals and 145 English monolinguals, within and between groups. For bilinguals, higher Spanish (L1) proficiency was related to less volume in the bilateral globus pallidus, and higher English (L2) proficiency and earlier English AoA were related to greater volume in the right thalamus, left accumbens, and bilateral globus pallidus. For monolinguals, higher English proficiency was associated with greater volume only in the right pallidum. These results suggest that subcortical gray matter structures are related to the learning of a second language. Future research is encouraged to understand subcortical adaptation in relation to L1 and L2 acquisition from a developmental perspective., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objective: The present study characterized heterogeneity in the cognitive profiles of monolingual and bilingual Latino older adults enrolled in the HABS-HD., Methods: A total of 859 cognitively unimpaired older adults completed neuropsychological testing. Raw scores for cognitive tests were converted to z -scores adjusted for age, education, sex, and language of testing. A latent profile analysis (LPA) was conducted for monolingual and bilingual speaker groups. A series of 2-5 class solutions were examined, and the optimal model was selected based on fit indices, posterior probabilities, proportion of sample sizes, and pattern of scores. Identified classes were compared on sociodemographic, psychosocial, and health characteristics., Results: For the monolingual group ( n = 365), a 3-class solution was optimal; this consisted of a Low Average Memory group with low average verbal memory performances on the SEVLT Total Learning and Delayed Recall trials, as well as an Average Cognition group and a High Average Cognition group. For the bilingual group ( n = 494), a 3-class solution was observed to be optimal; this consisted of a Low Average Memory group, with low average verbal memory performances on the learning and delayed recall trials of Logical Memory; a Low Average Executive group, where performance on Trails A and B and Digit Substitution were the lowest; and a High Average Cognition group, where performance was generally in the high average range across most cognitive measures., Conclusions: Cognitive class solutions differed across monolingual and bilingual groups and illustrate the need to better understand cognitive variability in linguistically diverse samples of Latino older adults.

The present study aims to investigate morphosyntactic and semantic measures in bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking children aged 5.5-6.5 years with and without language impairment. In this cross-sectional study, the bilingual participants were thirty children with language impairment (LI) and fifteen typically developing children (TD) who were selected from nurseries and Speech therapy clinics. The language samples were collected through story-telling in Azeri and Persian languages, separately. The linguistic analysis was done based on morphosyntactic and semantic parameters. The Alberta Language and Development Questionnaire (ALDeQ) parent report questionnaire was completed via interviewing with the parents to differentiate language impairment from language differences. Study findings revealed a significant difference between the morphosyntactic and semantic scores in two groups of bilingual Azeri-Persian speaking LI and TD children ( p ˂ 0.05). Also, the results demonstrated no significant relationship between the scores of linguistic scores and age in LI and TD children ( p  < 0.05). According to the result of the study, morphosyntactic and semantic parameters of language samples in bilingual Azeri-Persian-speaking children could be utilized to provide diagnostic information for speech and language pathologists in LI children among bilingual Azeri-Persian communities.

Background/objectives: Speaker race and the listener's language experience (i.e., monolinguals vs. bilinguals) have both been shown to influence accent intelligibility independently. Speaker race specifically is thought to be informed by learned experiences (exemplar model) or individual biases and attitudes (bias-based model). The current study investigates speaker race and the listener's language experience simultaneously as well as listeners' attitudes toward non-native speakers and their ability to identify the accent., Methods: Overall, 140 White English monolinguals and 140 English/Norwegian bilinguals transcribed 60 Mandarin-accented English sentences presented in noise in the context of a White or East Asian face. Following sentence transcription, participants were asked to rate the strength of the accent heard and completed a short questionnaire that assessed their accent identification ability and their language usage, proficiency, familiarity, and attitudes., Results: Results show that a listeners' ability to identify an accent and their attitudes toward non-native speakers had a significant impact on accent intelligibility and accentedness ratings. Speaker race by itself did not play a role in accent intelligibility and accentedness ratings; however, we found evidence that speaker race interacted with participants' accent identification scores and attitudes toward non-native speakers, and these interactions differed as a function of language experience., Conclusions: Our results suggest that bilinguals' sociolinguistic processing may be more in line with a bias-based model than monolinguals.

Recent discussions have emphasized the significance of embodied processing in language comprehension. Nevertheless, continuous debates persist regarding the relative contribution of modal (embodied) and amodal (abstract) processing of language. The current study investigated the contribution of modal processing in the first (L1) and second (L2) language, hypothesizing higher level of abstract amodal symbol processing in L2 than L1, since the correspondence of L1 and L2 (i.e., the symbol-to-symbol assignment) is in the foreground when learning L2. We employed the modality-switch paradigm (Pecher et al., 2003) in both German and French versions with proficient sequential German and French bilinguals ( N  = 79). Participants were presented with noun-adjective pairs (e.g., keys - jingling) in both languages and decided whether the adjective could be applied to the noun. This task repeatedly requires switching modality between trials, (e.g., from auditory [keys - jingling] to olfactory [soap - perfumed]), typically causing switch costs on response latency as compared to maintaining the modality. Contrary to the hypothesis, we observed modality switch effects (MSE) in both L1 and L2. This result suggests that embodied language processing occurs not only in the first language but also extends to the second language thus challenging the assumption that L2 processing predominantly involves abstract amodal symbol processing. Notably, however, significant L1 and L2 MSEs were found for French, whereas for German already the L1 effect was rather weak (though significant); the corresponding L2 effect was not significant. Thus, the results hinted at differences between languages regarding the relative role of modal and amodal processing., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Wentura, Shi and Degner.)

As awareness of the value of genetic counseling services increases, there has been greater recognition of the need to diversify service delivery into different languages. Studies within genetic counseling and related fields have identified complications that can arise from language nonconcordance between provider and patient. A strategy to mitigate language barriers is prioritizing the development of a multilingual workforce of genetic counselors (GCs) who can communicate with patients in their preferred language. This exploratory study assessed the experiences of multilingual GCs who have practiced in a clinical role with the aim to identify relevant challenges and differences when counseling in their nondominant language. Statistical analysis was performed to identify differences in session tasks and emotions experienced when counseling in one's nondominant language versus their dominant language. Data analysis identified an increase in reported difficulty level for most clinical tasks while using a nondominant language, most notably for difficulty with psychosocial counseling, disclosing results, and administrative tasks. Participants were also surveyed on employer support and resources provided. Overall, results suggest that multilingual GCs may benefit from greater support in certain areas within clinical roles to enhance their ability to provide patient care in their nondominant language., (© 2024 National Society of Genetic Counselors.)

Cross-linguistically, nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have been found to differentiate between typically developing (TD) children and those with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), even when second-language TD (L2-TD) children are considered. This study examined such group differences in Cantonese. Fifty-seven age-matched children (19 monolingual DLD (MonDLD); 19 monolingual TD (MonTD); and 19 L2-TD) repeated language-specific nonwords with varying lexicality levels and Cantonese-adapted quasi-universal nonwords. At whole-nonword level scoring, on the language-specific, High-Lexicality nonwords, MonDLD scored significantly below MonTD and L2-TD groups which did not differ significantly from each other. At syllable-level scoring, the same pattern of group differentiation was found on quasi-universal nonwords. These findings provide evidence from a typologically distinct and understudied language that NWR tasks can capture significant TD/DLD group differences, even for L2-Cantonese TD children with reduced language experience. Future studies should compare the performance of an L2-DLD group and evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of Cantonese NWR., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Stuttering is progressively reduced when persons who stutter repeatedly read the same text. This reduction has been recently attributed to motor learning with repeated practice of speech-motor sequences. In the present study, we investigated the adaptation effect of 17 bilingual adults who stutter (BAWS). We asked these participants to complete a particular paradigm of reading passages with a 30-minute break between them. Participants were Kannada-English speaking BAWS. We split them into two groups of eight and nine participants, respectively who read in counter-balanced order two passages written in the Kannada and English languages. The averaged data from the two groups resulted in a typical adaptation curve for the five readings when read separately in both languages. When there was a switch from readings in Kannada to readings in English, there was a significant increase in the percentage of syllables stuttered. This increase in dysfluencies reduced the adaptation effect from repeated reading. These findings support the hypothesis that motor learning plays a crucial role in stuttering adaptation when participants read the same passage repeatedly in any language, but the shift in the language read suggests an interference in motor learning. Collectively, our results highlight an interaction effect between motor learning and language proficiency, seen by increased dysfluencies and a reduced adaptation effect in bilingual speakers., Competing Interests: Declaration of Conflicting InterestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Working memory (WM) capacity has been shown to influence how readers resolve syntactic ambiguities. Building on the work of Swets et al. (2007, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136[1], 64-81), the goal of the present study was to assess the effects of working memory and language proficiency on first language (L1) relative clause attachment decisions across three different language samples: English monolinguals, L1-L2 Spanish-English heritage bilinguals, and L1-L2 Mandarin-English bilinguals. Binomial logistic regression analyses demonstrated that low WM span is associated with a preference to attach ambiguous relative clauses higher in the syntactic structure, as reported by Swets et al. (2007), and contrary to a recency strategy. We also observed that proficiency in L1 and L2 have little effect, suggesting that relative clause attachment preferences primarily reflect the properties of the language and the working memory capacity of the comprehender., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Lay Abstract: In the United States, many people have heritage languages they speak in their homes other than English, such as Chinese or Spanish. Autistic children whose families speak different languages could benefit from support and teaching in their heritage languages. Still, caregivers have reported that it is challenging to do so. Many autism professionals make suggestions that are not based on research. To date, researchers have not examined the perspectives of the small group of bilingual professionals in the United States who provide bilingual support for autistic children. Therefore, this study explored how bilingual autism providers in the United States talked about their work, bilingualism, and the impacts their bilingual work has on autistic children and families. The bilingual providers in this study reported many positive outcomes for autistic children when they can learn and use their heritage languages and some negative outcomes when providers cannot communicate in the same language. Recommendations from this study highlight the need to recruit more bilingual providers in the field of autism., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: All authors are Board Certified Behavior Analysts who stand to gain from favorable public perception of ABA. The authors certify that they have no current affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.

Introduction: The objective of the current study was two-fold. First, it aimed to estimate receptive vocabulary and expressive syntax skills in L2 Italian among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children of migrant single-mother families with very low socioeconomic status (SES). This objective was achieved by matching the participants' performance with normative data. Secondly, this study aimed to identify which individual and language exposure factors contributed to learning L2 vocabulary and syntax., Methods: Twenty-four early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children (age range = 5.10-12.4 years) and their mothers were enrolled. Mothers answered questions about linguistic biography and demographic information. Children completed Lexical Comprehension, Sentence Repetition, and Non-Word Repetition tasks from the Language Assessment Battery for 4-12-year-olds to, respectively, assess receptive vocabulary, expressive syntax, and phonological processing. Moreover, non-verbal intellectual functioning was evaluated by the Raven's Test., Results/discussion: Compared to normative data, 20 children showed lower receptive vocabulary abilities (<-1.5 SD), 24 lower expressive syntax skills (-2DS), and 7 children lower phonological processing (<-1.5 DS). Moreover, L2 phonological processing and the length of L2 exposure in an educational context positively predicted L2 receptive vocabulary as well as L2 expressive syntax skills. To date, performance in L2 among early sequential/simultaneous bilingual children from migrant households and very low SES remains underexplored. Future efforts need to be directed towards the understanding of factors that impact oral competence in L2, considering that these children will also be exposed to written L2 in the school context.

Background: In contrast to most other languages, where the spoken and written words are similar, children that have mastered Spoken Arabic (SA) learn to read a new written form of Arabic usually called Literary Arabic (LA). This phenomenon is called "diglossia"., Methods: Based on a series of studies comparing monolingual Arabic speaking and bilingual children, it has been suggested that Arabic speaking individuals develop metacognitive abilities that are considered bilinguals de facto. Some of the cognitive functions that would seem to benefit from fluency in more than one language are metalinguistic and metacognitive awareness., Results: This review article summarizes the results of studies on the relationship between bilingualism, diglossia and executive functions (EFs) which involve metacognitive awareness, selective attention, control of inhibition and cognitive flexibility as well as working memory (phonemic manipulation and metalingual performances)., Conclusions: The findings are in line with research results that have shown that bilingualism has a positive effect on the functioning of an individual's attentional system across the lifespan. The neural basis of diglossia in Arabic, as well as the conclusions and implications drawn from the impact of diglossia on EF and on reading in Arabic, are discussed.

When learning new words, listeners must contend with multiple sources of ambiguity and variability. Research has revealed that learners can resolve referential ambiguity by tracking co-occurrence statistics between words and their referents across multiple exposures over time-a process termed cross-situational word learning (XSWL). However, the degree to which variability in the input, such as input from multiple speakers, and variability in learner experience, such as bilingual language experience, modulate XSWL remains unclear. In this study, we examined the effects of speaker variability in XSWL performance in monolingual adults and bilingual adults with a range of second language backgrounds and language acquisition histories. Results revealed above-chance word learning in both the single and the multiple-speaker conditions across language groups. An advantage for word learning was observed in the single-speaker condition, but the effects of bilingual language experience were null. This research adds to the limited body of work dedicated to extending theories of statistical learning to account for variations in both input and learner characteristics as well as their interactions., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Multi-talker noise impedes children's speech processing and may affect children listening to their second language more than children listening to their first language. Evidence suggests that multi-talker noise also may impede children's memory retention and learning. A total of 80 culturally and linguistically diverse children aged 7 to 9 years listened to narratives in two listening conditions: quiet and multi-talker noise (signal-to-noise ratio +6 dB). Repeated recall (immediate and delayed recall), was measured with a 1-week retention interval. Retention was calculated as the difference in recall accuracy per question between immediate and delayed recall. Working memory capacity was assessed, and the children's degree of school language (Swedish) exposure was quantified. Immediate narrative recall was lower for the narrative encoded in noise than in quiet. During delayed recall, narrative recall was similar for both listening conditions. Children with higher degrees of school language exposure and higher working memory capacity had better narrative recall overall, but these factors were not associated with an effect of listening condition or retention. Multi-talker babble noise does not impair culturally and linguistically diverse primary school children's retention of spoken narratives as measured by multiple-choice questions. Although a quiet listening condition allows for a superior encoding compared with a noisy listening condition, details are likely lost during memory consolidation and re-consolidation., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

There is little research on the production of speech disfluencies such as silent pauses, repetitions, self-corrections, and filled pauses (e.g., eh, em) in monolingual autistic children, and there is no data on this crucial part of speech production in bilingual autistic children. This study aims to address this gap by examining disfluency production in bilingual autistic and non-autistic children across two linguistically distinct languages, HL-Russian (the home language) and SL-Hebrew (the societal language). Fifty-one bilingual Russian-Hebrew-speaking autistic and non-autistic children aged 5-9 (autistic: n = 21; non-autistic: n = 30), matched for age and non-verbal intelligence, participated in picture-based story-generation tasks (LITMUS MAIN, Gagarina et al., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, 63:1-36, 2019). Audio recordings of narrative samples were transcribed, coded, and scored for eleven disfluency types using CLAN tools. The non-autistic group produced higher overall disfluency rate than the autistic group. The autistic group exhibited fewer filled and silent pauses than the non-autistic group in HL-Russian. Furthermore, non-autistic children manifested varied distribution of disfluency types across languages, while autistic children displayed more consistent patterns across languages. In summary, we replicated findings from previous research on monolinguals only partly, as no between-group difference in filled pauses was found in SL-Hebrew. Additionally, bilingual autistic children exhibited language-universal patterns of disfluency production, whereas their non-autistic peers displayed language-specific patterns., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Background: Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a language-based dementia, causing progressive decline of language functions. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can augment effects of speech-and language therapy (SLT). However, this has not been investigated in bilingual patients with PPA., Objective: We evaluated the case of Mr. G., a French (native language, L1)/Dutch (second language, L2)-speaking 59-year-old male, with logopenic PPA, associated with Alzheimer's disease pathology. We aimed to characterize his patterns of language decline and evaluate the effects of tDCS applied to the right posterolateral cerebellum on his language abilities and executive control circuits., Methods: In a within-subject controlled design, Mr. G received 9 sessions of sham and anodal tDCS combined with semantic and phonological SLT in L2. Changes were evaluated with an oral naming task in L2, the Boston Naming Task and subtests of the Bilingual Aphasia Test in in L2 and L1, the Stroop Test and Attention Network Test, before and after each phase of stimulation (sham/tDCS) and at 2-month follow-up., Results: After anodal tDCS, but not after sham, results improved significantly on oral naming in L2, with generalization to untrained tasks and cross-language transfer (CLT) to L1: picture naming in both languages, syntactic comprehension and repetition in L2, and response times in the incongruent condition of the Attention Network Test, indicating increased inhibitory control., Conclusions: Our preliminary results are the first to indicate that tDCS applied to the cerebellum may be a valuable tool to enhance the effects of SLT in bilingual patients with logopenic PPA., Competing Interests: The authors have no conflict of interest to report., (© 2024 – The authors. Published by IOS Press.)

Research on the neural imprint of dual-language experience, crucial for understanding how the brain processes dominant and non-dominant languages, remains inconclusive. Conflicting evidence suggests either similarity or distinction in neural processing, with implications for bilingual patients with brain tumors. Preserving dual-language functions after surgery requires considering pre-diagnosis neuroplastic changes. Here, we combine univariate and multivariate fMRI methodologies to test a group of healthy Spanish-Basque bilinguals and a group of bilingual patients with gliomas affecting the language-dominant hemisphere while they overtly produced sentences in either their dominant or non-dominant language. Findings from healthy participants revealed the presence of a shared neural system for both languages, while also identifying regions with distinct language-dependent activation and lateralization patterns. Specifically, while the dominant language engaged a more left-lateralized network, speech production in the non-dominant language relied on the recruitment of a bilateral basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical circuit. Notably, based on language lateralization patterns, we were able to robustly decode (AUC: 0.80 ± 0.18) the language being used. Conversely, bilingual patients exhibited bilateral activation patterns for both languages. For the dominant language, regions such as the cerebellum, thalamus, and caudate acted in concert with the sparsely activated language-specific nodes. In the case of the non-dominant language, the recruitment of the default mode network was notably prominent. These results demonstrate the compensatory engagement of non-language-specific networks in the preservation of bilingual speech production, even in the face of pathological conditions. Overall, our findings underscore the pervasive impact of dual-language experience on brain functional (re)organization, both in health and disease., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Previous studies using cognates with the same writing system have found cognate facilitation effect in the lexical processes of spoken and typewritten productions and cognate interference effect in the sub-lexical process of typewritten production. This study focused on cross-script cognates, Chinese-English, which have different writing systems, and explored cognate effects based on the input and output modalities by using a Chinese-English translation task. Experiment 1 was under visual input modality and investigated the cross-script cognate effect in all three output modalities: spoken, typewritten and handwritten. Results revealed a cognate facilitation effect in the lexical processes across all three output modalities. However, it showed a cognate facilitation effect rather than a cognate interference effect in the sub-lexical process of typewritten production. Experiment 2 was under auditory input modality and focused on exploring cross-script cognate effect on typewritten and handwritten modalities, finding a consistent result on cognate effects with Experiment 1. Both experiments showed higher accuracy for cognates, and there was no significant difference in cgnate effect between visual and auditory inputs. In summary, these findings indicated that the use of cross-script cognates could effectively mitigate cognate interference. While spoken, handwritten and typewritten production share lexical processes, differences emerge in sub-lexical processes, with spoken production being less influenced by orthography. Furthermore, combining the results of Experiments 1 and 2, typewritten production may lean towards the phonological route while handwritten production may favour the direct lexical-orthographic route in the sub-lexical processes., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Previous research has established that bilinguals automatically activate lexical items in both of their languages in a nonselectivemanner, even when processing linguistic information in the second language (L2) alone. However, whether this co-activation extends to the sub-lexical level remains debated. In this study, we investigate whether bilinguals access sub-lexical information while processing in their L2. Thirty-two Chinese-English bilinguals and thirty-one English monolinguals completed an EEG-based semantic relatedness task, during which they judged whether pairs of English words were related in meaning or not (±S). Unbeknownst to the participants, the form (±F) of the Chinese translations in half of the pairs shared a sub-lexical semantic radical. This leads to four conditions: +S+F, +S-F, -S+F, and -S-F. This design, along with the comparison to English monolinguals, allows us to examine if bilinguals' native language is activated at the sub-lexical level when they are exposed only to L2. The results revealed that both groups showed sensitivity to semantic relatedness, as evidenced by a greater N400 for semantic unrelated pairs than related pairs, with monolinguals eliciting a more pronounced difference. Bilinguals, on the other hand, exhibited a greater P200 difference compared to monolinguals, indicating greater sensitivity to the hidden Chinese radical/form manipulation. These results suggest that highly proficient bilinguals automatically engage in lexical co-activation of their native language during L2 processing. Crucially, this co-activation extends to the sub-lexical semantic radical level.

Pediatric cancer treatments may contribute to slower processing, while cultural considerations (e.g., SES) can influence outcomes and tend to be disproportionately lower in racial/ethnic minorities. Given increased risk for certain cancers in Hispanic/Latine children and rising Spanish exposure in the United States, the purpose of this study was to examine differences in processing speed between cancer survivors based on household language exposure: English vs. mixed language (ML; i.e. monolingual Spanish-speaking or bilingual Spanish/English-speaking). 128 patients ages 8-21 with leukemia/lymphoma completed screening. As expected, SES was lower in patients from ML households based on parental education ( U  = 355.00, p <.001) and estimated household income ( U  = 1031.500, p <.001). Despite this, processing speed (assessed using the written and oral trials of the Symbol Digit Modalities Test; SDMT) was average (SDMT-W x̅=-.13, SDMT-O x̅=.32), with no significant differences between language groups ( F (2,120)=0.966 , p =.384). Post-hoc analyses revealed time since diagnosis did not predict performance on oral trial for either group or the whole sample, while poorer performance on written trial was noted among the English-only group when further from diagnosis (SDMT-W F(1,57)=7.829, p =.007). Stable ML group trajectory regardless of time since diagnosis may reflect resiliency among children with Spanish exposure.

Research has found that both first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers make predictions about upcoming linguistic information, with predictive behaviour being impacted by individual differences and methodological factors. However, it is not clear whether a cost is incurred when a prediction is made, but not met. L2 speakers have less experience with their L2 and parsing can be cognitively demanding, which together may lead L2 speakers to incur prediction costs differently relative to L1 speakers. In this study using the visual world paradigm, we test whether L1 and L2 speakers predict in the same way, within the same time frame, and incur the same costs if predictions are not met. We also explore the role of proficiency and speech rate. We found that both groups predict in a similar way and within a similar time frame. In addition, neither group incurred a prediction cost when the target was the most likely alternative, though L2 speakers take longer to shift their attention to the target object when predictions are not met. We argue that this reflects a slowing of lexical access rather than a specific cost of prediction. We only found prediction differences when speech rate was included in the analysis, highlighting the importance of attending to speech rate in studies using the visual world paradigm. Overall, this study supports research showing that both L1 and L2 speakers may make multiple partial predictions about upcoming information rather than predicting one specific lexical candidate while inhibiting less likely lexical candidates., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Theories of bilingual language production predict that bilinguals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) should exhibit one of two decline patterns. Either parallel decline of both languages (if decline reflects damage to semantic representations that are accessed by both languages), or asymmetrical decline, with greater decline of the nondominant language (if decline reflects reduced ability to resolve competition from the dominant language with disease progression). Only two previous studies examined decline longitudinally with one showing parallel, and the other asymmetrical, decline. We examined decline over 2-7 years (3.9 on average) in Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 23). Logistic regression revealed a parallel decline pattern at one year from baseline, but an asymmetrical decline pattern over the longer decline period, with greater decline of the nondominant language (when calculating predicted probabilities of a correct response). The asymmetrical decline pattern was significantly greater for the nondominant language only when including item-difficulty in the model. Exploratory analyses across dominance groups looking at proportional decline relative to initial naming accuracy further suggested that decline of the nondominant language may be more precipitous if that language was acquired later in life, but the critical interaction needed to support this possibility was not statistically significant in a logistic regression analysis. These results suggest that accessibility of the nondominant language may initially be more resilient in early versus more advanced AD, and that AD affects shared semantic representations before executive control declines to a point where the ability to name pictures in single-language testing block is disrupted. Additional work is needed to determine if asymmetrical decline patterns are magnified by late age of acquisition of the nondominant language, and if more subtle impairments to executive control underlie impairments to language switching that occur in the earliest stages of AD (even preclinically)., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The present study uses electroencephalography (EEG) with an N-back task (0-, 1-, and 2-back) to investigate if and how individual bilingual experiences modulate brain activity and cognitive processes. The N-back is an especially appropriate task given recent proposals situating bilingual effects on neurocognition within the broader attentional control system (Bialystok and Craik, 2022). Beyond its working memory component, the N-Back task builds in complexity incrementally, progressively taxing the attentional system. EEG, behavioral and language/social background data were collected from 60 bilinguals. Two cognitive loads were calculated: low (1-back minus 0-back) and high (2-back minus 0-back). Behavioral performance and brain recruitment were modeled as a function of individual differences in bilingual engagement. We predicted task performance as modulated by bilingual engagement would reflect cognitive demands of increased complexity: slower reaction times and lower accuracy, and increase in theta, decrease in alpha and modulated N2/P3 amplitudes. The data show no modulation of the expected behavioral effects by degree of bilingual engagement. However, individual differences analyses reveal significant correlations between non-societal language use in Social contexts and alpha in the low cognitive load condition and age of acquisition of the L2/2L1 with theta in the high cognitive load. These findings lend some initial support to Bialystok and Craik (2022), showing how certain adaptations at the brain level take place in order to deal with the cognitive demands associated with variations in bilingual language experience and increases in attentional load. Furthermore, the present data highlight how these effects can play out differentially depending on cognitive testing/modalities - that is, effects were found at the TFR level but not behaviorally or in the ERPs, showing how the choice of analysis can be deterministic when investigating bilingual effects., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Theory of Mind has long been studied as a core weakness in autism spectrum disorder due to its relationship with social reciprocity, while bilingualism has been shown to compensate for autistic individuals' mentalizing weaknesses. However, our knowledge of the Theory of Mind developmental trajectories of bilingual and monolingual autistic children, as well as of the factors related to Theory of Mind development in autism spectrum disorder is still limited. The current study has examined first- and second-order Theory of Mind skills in 21 monolingual and 21 bilingual autistic children longitudinally across three time points, specifically at ages 6, 9, and 12, and also investigated associations between Theory of Mind trajectories and trajectories of the children's language, intelligence and executive function skills. The results reveal that bilingual autistic children outperformed their monolingual peers in second-order Theory of Mind at ages 9 and 12, and that intelligence and, especially, expressive vocabulary skills played a pivotal role in advancing bilingual autistic children's second-order Theory of Mind development. On the other hand, monolingual autistic children only managed to capitalize on their language and intelligence resources at age 12. The findings highlight the importance of investigating bilingualism effects on autistic children's advanced cognitive abilities longitudinally., (© 2024 The Author(s). Autism Research published by International Society for Autism Research and Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Listeners adjust their perception to match that of presented speech through shifting and relaxation of categorical boundaries. This allows for processing of speech variation, but may be detrimental to processing efficiency. Bilingual children are exposed to many types of speech in their linguistic environment, including native and non-native speech. This study examined how first language (L1) Spanish/second language (L2) English bilingual children shifted and relaxed phoneme categorization along the cue of voice onset time (VOT) during English speech processing after three types of language exposure: native English exposure, native Spanish exposure, and Spanish-accented English exposure. After exposure to Spanish-accented English speech, bilingual children shifted categorical boundaries in the direction of native English speech boundaries. After exposure to native Spanish speech, children shifted to a smaller extent in the same direction and relaxed boundaries leading to weaker differentiation between categories. These results suggest that prior exposure can affect processing of a second language in bilingual children, but different mechanisms are used when adapting to different types of speech variation.

There is emerging evidence that bilingualism is advantageous to children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN), reflected in recommendations to promote maintenance of the home language. However, little is known about Speech and Language Therapists (SLTs)' opinions on bilingualism and practices with bilingual families. To survey the opinions and practices of SLTs on this topic, a questionnaire was developed and delivered as an anonymous web-based survey. We recruited SLTs from Singapore, where bilingualism is the norm amongst the general population and enshrined in government policies, and the UK, where bilingualism is less prevalent and not embedded in government policy. Questions probed SLTs' opinions, advice given to parents/carers, personal and professional experience of bilingualism, and knowledge of and opinions on official guidelines from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapy (RCSLT). The survey revealed variability in opinions and practices of SLTs working with bilingual families. Amongst the UK-based respondents, the RCSLT bilingualism guidance was generally perceived positively, however, many were unfamiliar with its content, or found barriers to its implementation. Most SLTs reported recommending bilingualism to families of children with SLCN and suggesting that parents/carers speak in all languages they are proficient in, but a minority reported views and practice based on outdated assumptions: practitioners who believed bilingualism can cause or contribute to SLCN were less likely to recommend that parents/carers speak languages they are proficient in. These findings can help identify areas to target within training and continuing professional development to increase evidence-based advice given to bilingual families.

Werker and Tees (1984) prompted decades of research attempting to detail the paths infants take towards specialisation for the sounds of their native language(s). Most of this research has examined the trajectories of monolingual children. However, it has also been proposed that bilinguals, who are exposed to greater phonetic variability than monolinguals and must learn the rules of two languages, may remain perceptually open to non-native language sounds later into life than monolinguals. Using a visual habituation paradigm, the current study tests this question by comparing 15- to 18-month-old monolingual and bilingual children's developmental trajectories for non-native phonetic consonant contrast discrimination. A novel approach to the integration of stimulus presentation software with eye-tracking software was validated for objective measurement of infant looking time. The results did not support the hypothesis of a protracted period of sensitivity to non-native phonetic contrasts in bilingual compared to monolingual infants. Implications for diversification of perceptual narrowing research and implementation of increasingly sensitive measures are discussed., (Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Studies of non-linguistic statistical learning (SL) have often linked performance in SL tasks with differences in language outcomes. Most of these studies have focused on Western and high-income educational contexts, but children worldwide learn in radically different educational systems and communities, and often in a second language. In the west African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, children enter fifth grade (CM-1) with widely varying ages and literacy skills. Across three iteratively-developed experiments, 157 children, age 8-15 years, in rural communities in the greater-Adzópe region of Côte d'Ivoire watched sequences of cartoon images with embedded triplet patterns on touchscreen tablets, while performing a target-detection task. We assessed these tablet-based adaptations of non-linguistic visual SL and asked whether the children's individual differences in performance on the SL tasks were related to their first and second language and literacy skills. We found group-level evidence that children used the statistical regularities in the image sequence to gradually decrease their response times, but their responses on post-test discrimination did not reflect this learning. When evaluating the correlation between SL and language skills, individual differences related to other task demands predicted oral language skills shared by first and second languages, while SL better predicted second language print skills. These findings suggest that non-linguistic SL paradigms can measure similar skills in Ivorian children as previous samples, but they also echo recent calls for further cross-cultural validation, greater internal reliability, and tests for confounding variables (such as processing speed) in studies of individual differences in statistical learning. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: We iteratively adapted three visual statistical learning studies for children in rural Côte d'Ivoire. Group-level analyses indicates that the children learn the underlying statistical regularities. Individual-differences analyses reveal some evidence that the statistical learning measure is also correlated with task demands that may be driven by cross-cultural differences. Like previous research, statistical learning is correlated with second language literacy, but we did not find a relationship between SL and oral language skills in first and second languages., (© 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Language experience confers a benefit to voice learning, a concept described in the literature as the language familiarity effect (LFE). What experiences are necessary for the LFE to be conferred is less clear. We contribute empirically and theoretically to this debate by examining within and across language voice learning with Cantonese-English bilingual voices in a talker-voice association paradigm. Listeners were trained in Cantonese or English and assessed on their abilities to generalize voice learning at test on Cantonese and English utterances. By testing listeners from four language backgrounds - English Monolingual, Cantonese-English Multilingual, Tone Multilingual, and Non-tone Multilingual groups - we assess whether the LFE and group-level differences in voice learning are due to varying abilities (1) in accessing the relative acoustic-phonetic features that distinguish a voice, (2) learning at a given rate, or (3) generalizing learning of talker-voice associations to novel same-language and different-language utterances. The specific four language background groups allow us to investigate the roles of language-specific familiarity, tone language experience, and generic multilingual experience in voice learning. Differences in performance across listener groups shows evidence in support of the LFE and the role of two mechanisms for voice learning: the extraction and association of talker-specific, language-general information that is more robustly generalized across languages, and talker-specific, language-specific information that may be more readily accessible and learnable, but due to its language-specific nature, is less able to be extended to another language., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing monolingual and bilingual infants' brain responses to speech. We used functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure 4-month-old Spanish-Basque bilingual and Spanish monolingual infants' brain responses while they listened to forward (FW) and backward (BW) speech stimuli in Spanish. We reveal distinct neural signatures associated with bilingual adaptations, including increased engagement of bilateral inferior frontal and temporal regions during speech processing in bilingual infants, as opposed to left hemispheric functional specialization observed in monolingual infants. This study provides compelling evidence of bilingualism-induced brain adaptations during speech processing in infants as young as 4 months. These findings emphasize the role of early language experience in shaping neural plasticity during infancy suggesting that bilingual exposure at this young age profoundly influences the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Purpose: The study aimed to understand how bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) and those with developmental language disorder (DLD) use frequent word co-occurrences in their narratives., Method: We studied the change over time in the word co-occurrences used by 30 Spanish-English bilingual children with and without DLD (experimental group). An additional normative group consisted of 98 TLD Spanish-English bilingual first graders. Children narrated two Spanish and two English stories in kindergarten and first grade. Employing a Python program on the transcribed narratives, we extracted all adjacent two-word and three-word co-occurrences. From the normative group, the 90 most frequently occurring two-word and 90 most frequently occurring three-word co-occurrences were extracted. The type and tokens of word co-occurrences each child in the experimental group produced out of the 180 identified word co-occurrences were analysed., Result: Overall, children at first grade produced more word co-occurrences types than in kindergarten. Children with DLD used fewer types of word co-occurrences but produced them as often as than their TLD peers. Children with DLD increased their word co-occurrences from kindergarten to first grade at the same rate although at a lower frequency. Children in both groups produced similar types and tokens of word co-occurrences in both Spanish and English, except tokens of two word co-occurrences. Children produced two word co-occurrences more often in English than in their Spanish narratives., Conclusion: The results shed light on children with DLD's deficits in production of word co-occurrences, indirectly reflecting possible deficits in statistical pattern detection.

Spoken lessons (lectures) are commonly used in schools as a medium for conveying educational content. In adolescence, experience-expectant maturation of language and cognitive systems supports learning; however, little is known about whether or how learners' language experiences interact with this integration process during learning. We examined functional connectivity using fMRI in 38 Spanish-English bilingual (L1-Spanish) and English monolingual (L1-English) adolescents during a naturalistic science video lesson in English. Seed analyses including the left inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis) and posterior middle temporal gyrus showed that L1-Spanish adolescents, when learning in their second language (L2), displayed widespread bilateral functional connectivity throughout the cortex while L1-English adolescents displayed mostly left-lateralized connectivity with core language regions over the course of the science lesson. Furthermore, we identified functional seed connectivity associated with better learning outcomes for adolescents with diverse language backgrounds. Importantly, functional connectivity patterns in L1-Spanish adolescents while learning in English also correlate with their Spanish cloze reading. Findings suggest that functional networks associated with higher-order language processing and cognitive control are differentially engaged for L1 vs. L2 speakers while learning new information through spoken language., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

Tasks measuring human creativity overwhelmingly rely on both language comprehension and production. Although most of the world's population is bilingual, few studies have investigated the effects of language of operation on creative output. This is surprising given that fluent bilinguals master inhibitory control, a mechanism also at play in creative idea evaluation. Here, we compared creative output in the two languages of Polish(L1)-English(L2) bilinguals engaged in a cyclic adaptation of the Alternative Uses Task increasing the contribution of idea evaluation (convergent thinking). We show that Polish-English bilinguals suffer less cognitive interference when generating unusual uses for common objects in the L2 than the L1, without incurring a significant drop in idea originality. Right posterior alpha oscillation power, known to reflect creative thinking, increased over cycles. This effect paralleled the increase in originality ratings over cycles, and lower alpha power (8-10 Hz) was significantly greater in the L1 than the L2. Unexpectedly, we found greater beta (16.5-28 Hz) desynchronization in the L2 than the L1, suggesting that bilingual participants suffered less interference from competing mental representations when performing the task in the L2. Whereas creative output seems unaffected by language of operation overall, the drop in beta power in the L2 suggests that bilinguals are not subjected to the same level of semantic flooding in the second language as they naturally experience in their native language., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest None, (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

A scoping review of the literature was undertaken using JBI guidelines to map the evidence of parent-led therapy (PLT) for young autistic children (≤ 6 years) raised in bilingual environments. Reviewers used Covidence to screen located sources. Sixteen papers met inclusion criteria. A strong acceleration of reports of PLT for young autistic children measured in bilingual environments was observed, with 93.8% of papers (n = 15) published since 2015. Reporting of participants' language environments (home language(s)/L1s and societal language(s)/L2s) was inconsistent. A large majority of these studies, 87.5% (n = 14) were conducted in North America or in collaboration with a North American institution. Diverse PLT programs and methodologies were identified. There is variation in demographic information collected and outcomes reported. Evidence gaps in the literature are identified and the value of undertaking systematic review on this topic is considered. This scoping review points to the necessity of further empirical research and practice that centres parents in early and specific support for autistic children raised in bilingual environments. Suggestions for improving reporting standards of language profiles are provided., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

According to the Critical Period Hypothesis, successful language learning is optimal during early childhood, whereas language learning outside of this time window is unsuccessful. In this respect, early language acquisition is viewed as convergent and reliable but late acquisition is not. The present study revisits the idea of a critical period by investigating the grammatical attainment of early bilinguals/heritage speakers (HSs), late second/foreign language (L2) learners, and comparable groups of monolinguals by testing Greek-English bilinguals in the two languages they speak by means of a grammaticality judgment task. Our findings show that in English, HSs performed on par with monolinguals, both groups surpassing the late L2 learners, who performed about 2 SDs below the HSs and the monolinguals. In Greek, late L2 learners and monolinguals exhibited comparable performance, contrasting sharply with the HSs' significantly lower proficiency, which was on average about 5 SDs below the late L2 learners and the monolinguals. Consequently, our results show that the performance gaps between HSs and Greek monolinguals/late L2 learners were more pronounced than the differences between late L2 learners and English monolinguals/HSs, suggesting that the early bilinguals' success in English may come at the expense of their heritage language (Greek). Furthermore, we observe substantially more individual variation within HSs in their heritage language than within the late L2 learners for their second language. Thus, testing bilinguals in both of their languages allows us to unveil the complexity of grammatical ultimate attainment and prompt a re-thinking of age as the major determining factor of (un)successful attainment., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Prela, Dąbrowska and Llompart.)

Currently available data show mixed results as to whether the processing of emotional information has the same characteristics in the native (L1) as in the second language (L2) of bilinguals. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment to shed light on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying bilinguals' emotional processing in L1 and L2 during an emotional interference task (i.e., the Emotional Stroop Task - EST). Our sample comprised proficient Italian-English bilinguals who learned their L2 during childhood mainly in instructional rather than immersive contexts. In spite of no detectable behavioural effects, we found stronger brain activations for L1 versus L2 emotional words in sectors of the posteromedial cortex involved in attention modulation, episodic memory, and affective processing. While fMRI findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a stronger emotional resonance when processing words in a native language, our overall pattern of results points to the different sensitivity of behavioural and hemodynamic responses to emotional information in the two languages of bilingual speakers., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Del Maschio, Sulpizio, Bellini, Del Mauro, Giannachi, Buga, Fedeli, Perani and Abutalebi.)

Dynamic assessment (DA) is a tool used to assess children's learning potential. Research on English-speaking children indicates that DA effectively diagnoses language disorders in monolingual and bilingual children. However, few DAs have been developed for French-speaking children. This study aimed to examine the validity of a dynamic phonological awareness task for differentiating French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Thirty-eight monolingual and bilingual children, aged 4-8 years, 23 with typical development (TD) and 15 with DLD, participated in the study. They performed a dynamic phoneme segmentation task, in which graduated cues were provided. Children were also administered a nonword repetition (NWR) task, and a modifiability scale, in which the examiner rated the child's responsivity during the task. Statistical analyses examined what factors influenced dynamic task performance, and calculated the sensitivity and specificity of the tests. Results indicated that four factors emerged as significant in a mixed-effects logistic regression model: age, diagnostic group (TD vs. DLD), modifiability, and the number of phonemes in the target word. Older children who had TD and higher modifiability scores had better segmentation skills than other children. Words with fewer phonemes were also easier to segment than words with greater numbers of phonemes. The dynamic task had good sensitivity in the identification of DLD but less good specificity. Our findings indicate that a dynamic task of phonological awareness has the potential to be used as a diagnostic tool to differentiate TD and DLD.

Objective language proficiency measures have been found to provide better and more consistent estimates of bilinguals' language processing than self-rated proficiency (e.g., Tomoschuk et al., 2019; Wen & van Heuven, 2017a). However, objectively measuring language proficiency is often not possible because of a lack of quick and freely available language proficiency tests (Park et al., 2022). Therefore, quick valid vocabulary tests, such as LexTALE (Lemhöfer & Broersma, 2012) and its extensions (e.g., LexITA: Amenta et al., 2020; LEXTALE-FR: Brysbaert, 2013; LexPT: Zhou & Li, 2022) have been developed to reliably assess language proficiency of speakers of various languages. The present study introduces a Lexical Test for Malay Speakers (LexMAL), which estimates language proficiency for Malay first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. An initial 180-item LexMAL prototype was evaluated using 60 Malay L1 and 60 L2 speakers in Experiment 1. Sixty words and 30 nonwords with the highest discriminative power that span across the full difficulty range were selected for the final LexMAL based on point-biserial correlations and an item response theory analysis. The validity of LexMAL was demonstrated through a reliable discrimination between L1 and L2 speakers, significant correlations between LexMAL scores and performance on other Malay language tasks (i.e., translation accuracy and cloze test scores), and LexMAL outperforming self-rated proficiency. A validation study (Experiment 2) with the 90-item final LexMAL tested with a different group of Malay L1 (N = 61) and L2 speakers (N = 61) replicated the findings of Experiment 1. LexMAL is freely available for researchers at www.lexmal.org ., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

This study investigated the role of dual- and single-language input in bilingual children's word learning. In Experiment 1, 26 Spanish-English bilingual children aged 4 and 5 years (9 girls; 73% Latino; 65% White) learned novel words in single- and dual-language conditions. In the single-language condition, children learned English-like labels for novel objects. In the dual-language condition, the same children learned Spanish- and English-like labels for a different set of objects; all labels were produced by the same bilingual speaker, creating competition between the two languages. A second group of bilingual children (N = 25; 14 girls; 72% Latino; 40% White) participated in Experiment 2, which tested whether tagging language by speaker in the dual-language condition (mimicking the one person-one language input strategy) would influence performance. In both experiments, participants learned novel English words above chance (ps < .05) in both conditions, with better performance in the single-language condition. These results indicate an advantage for single-language learning contexts, but the theoretical roots and the practical value of this advantage are unclear., (Copyright © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Purpose: The present study examines cross-sectional trends in performance on a quasi-universal non-word repetition (NWR) task. It also considers whether NWR performance is dependent on levels of exposure to a language and compares the performance of bilingual children across their two languages., Method: A cross-sectional design was employed. The English and French quasi-universal NWR tasks, featuring stimuli from two to five syllables in length, was administered to Canadian school-aged monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals: those who encountered their second language in early childhood and those who encountered their second language at school entry., Result: When evaluated in English, the early-exposure bilinguals produced significantly fewer errors than the school-entry exposure bilinguals and the English monolingual groups. When evaluated in French, the early-exposure bilinguals and the French monolinguals produced significantly fewer errors than the school-entry exposure bilinguals. Compared across languages, the French monolinguals produced fewer errors on the French version of the NWR task than the English monolinguals did on the English version of the same task. In both languages and across all analyses, the youngest age group (7-8 years) produced more errors than the two older groups (9-10 years and 11-12 years)., Conclusion: The quasi-universal NWR task showed sensitivity to improvements from 7 to 11 years of age in English and up to 9 years of age in French. Better performance in French may be due to the relatively greater frequency of multisyllabic words in that language. The development and use of this particular NWR task with monolinguals and bilinguals-in both of their languages-contribute to a deeper understanding of quasi-universal NWR performance in typically developing children.

Research on false memory in bilinguals using the DRM task has shown that false memories transfer across languages, but comparisons to within-language conditions have yielded mixed results. In two experiments, Spanish-English bilinguals completed standardized language assessments and a DRM task. Experiment 1 (N = 96) had several study-recall cycles before a final recognition test, and Experiment 2 (N = 72) only tested recognition. Relative to within-language conditions, more critical lures were recalled when the language changed from study to test and when words were studied in mixed-language sequences. With no prior recall test, the rate of critical lure recognition did not differ across language conditions. Language proficiency was not associated with the false-memory effects. Associations of false and veridical memory were negative in recall and positive in recognition. Overall, the findings indicate that proficient bilinguals can integrate information across their languages via a shared semantic network to form false memories., (© 2024. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

This study examined grammatical gender processing in school-aged children with varying levels of cumulative English exposure. Children participated in a visual world paradigm with a four-picture display where they heard a gendered article followed by a target noun and were in the context where all images were the same gender (same gender), where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender than the target noun (different gender), and where all of the distractor images were the opposite gender, but there was a mismatch in the gendered article and target noun pair. We investigated 51 children (aged 5;0-10;0) who were exposed to Spanish since infancy but varied in their amount of cumulative English exposure. In addition to the visual word paradigm, all children completed an article-noun naming task, a grammaticality judgment task, and standardized vocabulary tests. Parents reported on their child's cumulative English language exposure and current English language use. To investigate the time course of lexical facilitation effects, looks to the target were analyzed with a cluster-based permutation test. The results revealed that all children used gender in a facilitatory way (during the noun region), and comprehension was significantly inhibited when the article-noun pairing was ungrammatical rather than grammatical. Compared to children with less cumulative English exposure, children with more cumulative English exposure looked at the target noun significantly less often overall, and compared to younger children, older children looked at the target noun significantly more often overall. Additionally, children with lower cumulative English exposure looked at target nouns more in the different-gender condition than the same-gender condition for masculine items more than feminine items., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2024 Baron, Connell, Kleinman, Bedore and Griffin.)

Previous research has demonstrated the influence of emotions during linguistic processing, indicating the interactivity of both processes in the brain. However, little is known regarding such interplay in a second language (L2). This study addressed this question by examining the reading effects of syntactic violations while processing L2 emotional and neutral statements. Forty-six Spanish-English bilinguals with various levels of L2 proficiency and emotional resonance (i.e. capability for emotional experience in L2) were presented with a self-paced sentence reading task. Sentences contained positive (16), neutral (16) and negative (16) verbs, half of them presented in agreement and half in disagreement with the preceding pronoun. Analysis of verb reading times using linear mixed effects modelling revealed a significant interaction between syntactic violation, verb valence and emotional resonance, suggesting that stronger emotional L2 experience results in a higher saliency of negative verbs, reducing the impact of syntactic violations.

Lay Abstract: It is commonly believed among professionals and parents that exposure to two languages imposes an additional burden on children with autism spectrum disorder. However, there is a lack of empirical evidence to support or reject this belief. With the prevalence of autism and an increasing number of children growing up bilingual, it is urgent to understand how bilingual exposure interacts with autism. Bilingual autistic children from Hong Kong, with Cantonese as their first language and English as their second language, took part in the study. We used a production game to test how bilingual autistic children use different levels of linguistic knowledge to produce contrastive information in real conversations, compared to their monolingual autistic peers and typically developing children matched in language abilities, nonverbal IQ, working memory and maternal education. We found that bilingual autistic children performed as good as typically developing children in general, and they even performed better than monolingual autistic children. Our findings suggest a bilingual advantage in autistic children in conveying constative information in sentences. We thus encourage parents to engage their children in rich bilingual environments. Clinicians, educators and other professionals may also consider adding bilingual aspects in training programmes to support families raising bilingual autistic children., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Bilingual environments present an important context for word learning. One feature of bilingual environments is the existence of translation equivalents (TEs)-words in different languages that share similar meanings. Documenting TE learning over development may give us insight into the mechanisms underlying word learning in young bilingual children. Prior studies of TE learning have often been confounded by the fact that increases in overall vocabulary size with age lead to greater opportunities for learning TEs. To address this confound, we employed an item-level analysis, which controls for the age trajectory of each item independently. We used Communicative Development Inventory data from four bilingual datasets (two English-Spanish and two English-French; total N = 419) for modeling. Results indicated that knowing a word's TE increased the likelihood of knowing that word for younger children and for TEs that are more similar phonologically. These effects were consistent across datasets, but varied across lexical categories. Thus, TEs may allow bilingual children to bootstrap their early word learning in one language using their knowledge of the other language. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Bilingual children must learn words that share a common meaning across both languages, that is, translation equivalents, like dog in English and perro in Spanish. Item-level models explored how translation equivalents affect word learning, in addition to child-level (e.g., exposure) and item-level (e.g., phonological similarity) factors. Knowing a word increased the probability of knowing its corresponding translation equivalent, particularly for younger children and for more phonologically-similar translation equivalents. These findings suggest that young bilingual children use their word knowledge in one language to bootstrap their learning of words in the other language., (© 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

This study investigated the hypothesis of nonselective access to phonological representations in an integrated lexicon across logographic and alphabetic writing systems among Chinese L1 (first language)-English L2 (second language) bilinguals. We employed three experiments to test this hypothesis, including a lexical decision task (LDT) and a word naming task in Experiments 1 and 2 using the masked priming paradigm, and a self-paced sentence reading task in Experiment 3. Results from the LDT and the word naming task showed a significant homophone priming effect from L1 to L2, but not from L2 to L1. In the sentence reading task, we compared processing time between homophone error words and control words in the critical and spill-over regions. A slower processing effect in the homophone condition was observed in the spill-over region. Overall, these findings suggest that phonological priming occurs across a logographic and an alphabetic script in different tasks, whether reading isolated words or sentences. Bilingual reading involves an integrated bilingual lexicon that is independent of script similarity., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.