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Event segmentation tests have shown substantial overlaps in how adults recognize starts and endpoints as events unfold. However, far less is known about what role different language systems play in the process. Variations in grammatical aspect have been shown to influence event processing. We tested how closely first language (L1) speakers of Mandarin and English versus Mandarin learners of English as a second language (L2) align event boundaries with event-internal changes. We used two event boundary marking tasks (online/offline) and a sorting task. Participants saw 60 animations; their task was to indicate starts and endpoints. For punctual events (e.g., "breaking a wall"), Mandarin L1 speakers and Mandarin learners of English L2 were significantly further from event transitions than English L1 speakers. This pattern was replicated in the untimed experiment but not in sorting transitions, jointly suggesting that Mandarin L1 and Mandarin learners of English L2 may be less attentive to segmentation of phases surrounding transitions than English L1 speakers. We argue that this variation reflects L1-specific encoding of ongoingness.

Research has shown that speakers of different languages may differ in their cognitive and perceptual processing of reality. A common denominator of this line of investigation has been its reliance on the sensory domain of vision. The aim of our study was to extend the scope to a new sense-taste. Using as a starting point crosslinguistic differences in the category boundaries of edible bulbs, we examined whether monolingual speakers of English and bilingual speakers of Norwegian and English were influenced by language-specific categories during tasting. The results showed no evidence of such effects, not even for the Norwegian participants in an entirely Norwegian context. This suggests that crosslinguistic differences in visual perception do not readily generalize to the domain of taste. We discuss the findings in terms of predictive processing, with particular reference to trigeminal stimulation (a central tasting component) and the interplay between chemosensory signals and top-down linguistic modulation.

Color terms divide the color spectrum differently across languages. Previous studies have reported that speakers of languages that have different words for light and dark blue (e.g., Russian "siniy" and "goluboy") discriminate color chips sampled from these two linguistic categories faster than speakers of languages that use one basic color term for blue (e.g., English "blue"). This effect has been reported to be disrupted when participants engaged in a verbal interference task, suggesting that active language use can modulate the linguistic category effect. The current study provided a stringent test of this hypothesis by examining color discrimination under verbal interference in bilinguals speaking Lithuanian (two blue categories) and Norwegian (one blue category). The results revealed that the language activated during verbal interference had a significant impact on bilinguals' color discrimination. Specifically, Lithuanian-Norwegian bilinguals exhibited a color category effect only when performing the task under verbal interference in Lithuanian but not in Norwegian. This demonstrated, within the same individuals, the momentary effect of active language processing on color perception.

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Using event-related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment correlates in participants reporting the source of auditory words as being presented from above or below their sitting position. English bilinguals responded faster for congruent presentations of high-power words (presented above) but not for congruent presentations of low-power words (presented below) in both languages. Low-power words together also failed to modulate N400 amplitude or interact with language. However, follow-up analyses on high-power words showed congruency effects on N400 amplitude in Chinese but not in English. Finally, English controls showed no effect. This suggests that spatial embodiment differs across languages in bilinguals, but the roles of culture and proficiency require further research.

A central question in multilingualism research is how multiple languages interact. Most studies have focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) effects on a third language (L3), but a small number of studies dedicated to the opposite transfer direction have suggested stronger L3 influence on L2 than on L1 in postpuberty learners. In our study, we provide further support for stronger L3-to-L2 than L3-to-L1 influence and show that it extends to (a) phonetics and the lexicon and (b) childhood learners. Fifty Spanish-Basque-English trilingual adults who had acquired Spanish from birth and Basque between 2 to 4 years of age through immersion participated in a speeded trilingual switching task measuring production of voice onset time and lexical intrusions. Participants experienced more phonetic and lexical crosslinguistic influence from L3 English during L2-Basque production than during L1-Spanish production. These findings show that even highly proficient early bilinguals experience differential influence from a classroom-taught L3 to L1 and to L2.

A large number of children are exposed to more than one language. One well-established method of assessing early vocabulary development in monolingual children is parent report; however, its use in bilingual/multilingual contexts is less established and brings unique challenges. In this methodological scoping review, we reviewed studies of early vocabulary development using parent report with bilingual/multilingual children (January 1980-March 2022). A total of 576 articles were screened, yielding 101 studies for analysis. The number of studies on bilingual/multilingual vocabulary has grown in the last two decades; yet representation of the world's languages remains sparse. The majority of studies assessed bilingual/multilingual children's vocabulary in each language and used instruments adapted for linguistic and cultural characteristics. However, the field could benefit from standardized reporting practices regarding definitions of bi/multilingualism, selection of reporters, and tool development and is in critical need of studies that develop, validate, and norm parent report instruments specifically for the bilingual/multilingual case.

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing two-event sequences that were either temporally plausible or misaligned according to verb tense (time clash). Both upper-intermediate Chinese learners of English and native English speakers were able to detect time clashes between events, showing that Chinese participants could apply tense rules explicitly. However, a predicted modulation of the N400 event-related brain potential elicited by time clashes in English-speaking participants was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same Chinese participants could semantically process time information when it was lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high-functioning Chinese learners of English failed to process the meaning of tense-conveyed temporal information in real time.

Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and fire/water semantic category mappings, a semantic distinction that is explicitly marked by semantic radicals in Chinese but not in English and a type of form-meaning connections that has not been investigated. We found that 30 Cantonese-English bilinguals and 30 native English speakers learned the target form-meaning connections and that the knowledge that they developed may have been implicit, as shown through post-experiment verbal reports. Moreover, the bilingual group was significantly faster than the English group in distinguishing fire/water English nouns. These findings extend the range of semantic-based regularities that can be learned at the implicit level and suggest that the markings of fire/water distinctions in Chinese affect second language task performance.

Second language (L2) learners make gender errors with possessive pronouns. In production, these errors are modulated by the gender match between the possessor and possessee noun. We examined whether this so-called match effect extends to L2 comprehension by attempting to replicate a recent study on gender predictions in first language (L1) German speakers (Stone, Veríssimo, et al., 2021). By comparing Spanish and English learners of L2 German whose languages have different possessive constraints, we were able to examine whether the match effect was modulated by the participants' L1. A first experiment suggested that predictions and match effects were absent in setups with complex visual displays. A second experiment with simpler displays successfully elicited predictions and match effects, but their size was comparable in Spanish and English speakers, inconsistent with crosslinguistic influence. We interpret our results as evidence that processing difficulties with possessives result from memory interference that impacts both L1 and L2 comprehenders.

Most studies on bilingual children's metalinguistic awareness assess metalinguistic awareness using monolingual tasks. This may not reflect how a bilingual's languages dynamically interact with each other in creating metalinguistic representations. We tested 33 Greek-Italian bilingual children (8-11 years) for metalinguistic awareness using acceptability-rating tasks in which they had to judge and explain grammatical errors. The tasks were in monolingual and bilingual modes in order to show how far metalinguistic awareness in Italian benefited from the activation of Greek. The participants exhibited better metalinguistic awareness abilities in Italian in the bilingual acceptability-rating task in which Greek was activated. The benefits of the bilingual mode were visible in the judgment and explanation of errors and were modulated by syntactic processing abilities in Italian, length of exposure to Italian, type of structure, and age. The results show that metalinguistic awareness can be shared across languages. We discuss the pedagogical implications of our findings.

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an artificial L3 and preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at the very beginning of the acquisition process. We exposed four groups of 30 Norwegian-English bilinguals each to one of four L3s and gave them training in that L3. The participants gave forced-choice acceptability judgments on pairs of nonsubject-initial declarative clauses that differed in word order, one grammatical in English, the other grammatical in Norwegian. The participants had not been exposed to nonsubject-initial declaratives during the exposure and training phases to avoid confounds with learning. The results showed that both lexical and syntactic similarities affect crosslinguistic influence. We discuss this result considering contemporary accounts of L3 acquisition.

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment exploring whether the figurativeness of collocations affects L2 processing of collocations. The participants were 40 English native speakers and 44 Chinese-speaking English foreign language learners (including doctoral, postgraduate, and undergraduate students). To ensure that the effect emerged from the figurativeness of collocations rather than other item-related confounds, this study added a literal-literal comparison (e.g., choose a career vs. choose a house) as a control to the experimental figurative-literal comparison (e.g., build a career vs. build a house). Results showed that L2 speakers processed figurative collocations more slowly than literal collocation controls but native speakers did not. Importantly, this processing cost for figurative collocations in L2 speakers varied by L2 proficiency but not phrase familiarity. We discuss the results in terms of the dual-route model of formulaic and novel language processing and also incorporate them into the literal salience model of bilingual figurative processing.

We use a novel paradigm to examine the effect of language exposure and variable input on the acquisition of words in primary school--aged children. Children growing up with different languages and foreign or regional accents in their input might benefit from their experience with variability when learning new words from peers with unfamiliar accents. We ask to what extent language and accent experience helps monolingual and bilingual children learn new words in the context of accent variability. Children (aged 7-11 years) played a computerized card game with virtual peers that resembles natural advanced lexical acquisition, during which new words are learned from child speakers and are produced actively in peer-group interactions. Successful word learning was predicted by the amount of input in regional and foreign accents but not by exposure to other languages (i.e., bilingualism). We discuss how accent experience affects word learning under variable input conditions.

The past decades have seen an explosion of research using electrophysiological or neuroimaging techniques for studying the neurocognitive underpinnings of second language (L2) processing. Although this field has a shorter history than does research on language learning more generally, important insights into the neurocognitive basis of L2 processing have driven it to the center stage of language science. In this target article for "Language Learning's" 75th Jubilee volume, I illustrate the field's impressive achievements by selectively reviewing electrophysiological and neuroimaging research on L2 processing and bilingual brain organization. I also review changing perspectives in the field (including individual difference and experience-based perspectives, neural network approaches, neuroplasticity, and L2-learning related neural changes) and identified challenges, promises, and future directions (revisit native-speaker benchmark, increase linguistic diversity, enhance ecological validity, intensify research on child L2 learners' brain, adopt lifelong approach to L2 learning) that can lead to a better understanding of the neural underpinnings of L2 learning and processing.

The last two decades have seen a significant amount of interest in bilingual language learning and processing. A number of computational models have also been developed to account for bilingualism, with varying degrees of success. In this article, we first briefly introduce the significance of computational approaches to bilingual language learning, along with a discussion of the major contributions of current models, their implications, and their limitations. We show that the current models have contributed to progress in understanding the bilingual mind, but significant gaps exist. We advocate a new research agenda integrating progress across different disciplines, such as computational neuroscience, natural language processing, and first language acquisition, to construct a pluralist computational account that combines high-level cognitive theories and neurobiological foundations for bilingual language learning. We outline the contributions and promises of this interdisciplinary approach in which we view bilingual language learning as a dynamic, interactive, and developmental process.

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning focuses primarily on bimodal bilinguals, mostly hearing adults learning their first sign language (M2L2 learners). However, other groups of L2 signers exist, including deaf learners who have previously acquired a sign language and are learning a new one (M1L2 learners). M1L2 acquisition offers unique insights into complex interactions including multilingualism, modality, and timing of acquisition. We argue that M1L2 signers are a key comparison group for investigations of various L2 and so-called modality effects and also represent a crucial test case for re-examining the traditional constructs of "native speaker/signer" and the effects of initial language delay or deprivation on subsequent language acquisition.

Montrul's (2008) onset age hypothesis predicts that, if attrition occurs in early bilingualism, it will be more severe in simultaneous than in sequential bilinguals. This study tested that prediction in an eye-tracking experiment focused on the processing of Spanish gender agreement during sentence reading. Heritage Spanish speakers exposed to English at different ages (0-3, 4-6, 7-10 years) read sentences containing violations of noun-adjective gender agreement in 2 distance conditions (adjacent, nonadjacent). Mixed-effects modeling with reverse Helmert contrasts showed that heritage speakers displayed sensitivity to gender agreement violations in their minority language regardless of onset age and noun-adjective proximity. However, onset age of majority language acquisition determined how early sensitivity manifested itself in the time course of grammatical processing. Consistent with Montrul's hypothesis, sequential bilinguals showed sensitivity to violations earlier in their eye-movement record than did simultaneous bilinguals. The results suggest onset age can affect grammatical processing in bilinguals who otherwise acquire target like mental representations.

This study examined the effectiveness of bilingual subtitles relative to captions, subtitles, and no subtitles for incidental vocabulary learning. Learners' processing of novel words in the subtitles and its relationship to learning gains were also explored. While their eye movements were recorded, 112 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English watched a documentary in one of 4 conditions: bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, and no subtitles. Vocabulary pretests and posttests assessed the participants' knowledge of the target vocabulary for form recognition, meaning recall, and meaning recognition. Results suggested an advantage for bilingual subtitles over captions for meaning recognition and over L1 subtitles for meaning recall. Bilingual subtitles were less effective than captions for form recognition. Participants in the bilingual subtitles group spent more time reading the Chinese translations of the target items than the English target words. The amount of attention to the English target words (but not to the translations) predicted learning gains.

The present study compared Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals within three age groups to examine whether bilinguals have an advantage in syntactic processing. Participants were tested on morphosyntactic awareness, word-order awareness, artificial syntax learning, and general cognitive abilities. Bilinguals within the three age groups performed better than their monolingual peers in acquiring a novel syntax and in processing morphosyntax specific to English. The bilingual adults also outperformed their monolingual peers in processing language-specific word order. Overall, the findings give credence to the structural sensitivity theory in accounting for bilingual syntactic processing. A bilingual advantage in language processing appears not confined to knowledge of and strategies specific to the additional language but constitutes a more abstract representation of underlying linguistic structure. Bilingual effects are also qualified by cross-language differences in linguistic features, age, and the amount of bilingual experience.

When learning novel vocabulary in a third language (L3) through translations in the first language (L1), bilinguals may have more available cognitive resources and more accumulated experience in language regulation compared to when learning through translations in the second language (L2). In a study designed to test language of instruction (LOI) effects, 59 Hebrew-English bilinguals auditorily learned over two sessions 55 words in German, including three word types: cognates, overlapping in form and meaning between English and German; false cognates, overlapping in form but not meaning; and controls. Critically, half of the participants learned through their (dominant) L1 Hebrew, and half through their L2 English (which is also more similar to German). Results showed a significant LOI effect, with better learning through the (less similar) L1, especially for control items. Cognates were learned better in both LOIs, but false cognates were learned better relative to controls to a greater extent when the LOI was English. Together, results highlight the importance of LOI and item-based language similarity during multilingual novel word-learning.

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality judgment test (GJT). Participants were 71 Polish-English long-term bilinguals with a wide range of AoOs (1-35 years) who differed in their context of learning and use (immersed vs. instructed). In immersed learners, we observed a growing dissociation between performance on grammatical and ungrammatical sentences as AoO was delayed. This effect was attenuated in those with better phonological short-term memory and statistical learning abilities and is consistent with a decline in the ability to learn from implicit negative evidence. In instructed learners, GJT performance was subject to additive effects of AoO and grammaticality and was not associated with either cognitive predictor, suggesting that implicit learning mechanisms were not involved.

This study aimed to test three competing hypotheses concerning the strength of the cross-language relationship in listening comprehension proficiency in emergent bilinguals: Cummins's developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis, Proctor, August, Snow, and Barr's interdependence continuum hypothesis, and Goodrich, Lonigan, Kleuver, and Farver's language independence hypothesis. We assessed 75 Turkish-Dutch bilingual children attending Dutch-medium schools using a two-wave design. This involved an assessment of sentence comprehension when the children were in preschool, followed by an assessment of their discourse comprehension in 1st grade. Correlational, multiple regression, and path analyses indicated significant positive and medium-sized L1-L2 relationships between listening comprehension proficiency at the two points in time yet not over time. These findings were consistent with the developmental linguistic interdependence hypothesis for sentence comprehension and with the developmental linguistic interdependence and the language independence hypotheses for discourse comprehension. We advocate a multidimensional explanatory framework to explore the moderating role of type of skill in determining the strength of the cross-language relationship.

Although computational models can simulate aspects of human sentence processing, research on this topic has remained almost exclusively limited to the single language case. The current review presents an overview of the state of the art in computational cognitive models of sentence processing, and discusses how recent sentence-processing models can be used to study bi- and multilingualism. Recent results from cognitive modeling and computational linguistics suggest that phenomena specific to bilingualism can emerge from systems that have no dedicated components for handling multiple languages. Hence, accounting for human bi-/multilingualism may not require models that are much more sophisticated than those for the monolingual case.

Does complexity make multilingualism special? Since there is no unequivocal notion of complexity on which researchers agree, several characteristics that have been considered crucial for complexity are brought to bear on multilingualism. While multilingualism is fairly complex in some senses, for instance, because it requires that many variables be studied, it is less clear whether multilingualism becomes special in this way. The most salient possible way in which multilingualism might be special due to its complexity is that qualitatively new features emerge as we move from mono- or bilingualism to multilingualism. While research in mathematics and physics has shown examples in which novel features emerge at a certain level, related results are not easily transferred to multilingualism. This is shown by analyzing the application of dynamic systems theory to multilingualism by Herdina and Jessner. It is ultimately a matter of empirical research whether there are suitable novel features that make multilingualism special.

This article addresses different ways scholars conceptualize the multilingual repertoire. Formal and functional approaches investigate crosslinguistic influence across clearly demarcated languages, while dynamic systems theory and translanguaging approaches question countability and boundedness of languages. Problems with both perspectives are discussed, and a unified approach that relies on the idea of languages as natural categories is presented as a form of conceptual reengineering. It embraces the possibility and the meaningfulness of the identification of languages in the repertoire while also accounting for their continuous, graded nature and the lack of clear boundaries of language categories. The proposal accounts for seemingly inconsistent findings on the effects of bi- and multilingualism on cognition and on language learning. Multilingualism as a field of inquiry is the investigation of an ordinary phenomenon; what is special about multilingualism is that multilingual speakers may have an extraordinary amount of language and linguistic variability at their disposal.

This study examined the crosslinguistic sharing of morphological awareness (MA) in biliteracy development. The analysis included 34 correlational studies with 41 independent samples (N = 4,104). Correlational coefficients were meta-analyzed, yielding four main findings: (a) the correlation between first language (L1) and second language (L2) MA was small (r = 0.30); (b) the interlingual correlations between L1 MA and L2 word decoding and between L1 MA and L2 reading comprehension were both small (r = 0.35, 0.39, respectively); (c) the intralingual correlations between L2 MA and L2 word decoding and between L2 MA and L2 reading comprehension were both moderate (r = 0.46, 0.52, respectively); and (d) MA measurement type and age were significant moderators. Our review suggests that there is a need for future research to align the definition and measurement of MA.

Orthographic forms (spellings) can affect pronunciation in a second language (L2); however, it is not known whether the same orthographic form can affect both L2 pronunciation and metalinguistic awareness. To test this, we asked 260 speakers of English--first-language (L1) English speakers, L1 Italian and L2 English sequential bilinguals, and L1 Italian learners of L2 English--to perform word repetition tasks and rhyme judgment tasks for word pairs containing the same consonant or vowel spelled with a letter or a digraph. L1 Italian speakers established a long-short contrast and used consonant and vowel length contrastively in their L2 English, both in production and in an awareness task. This provides evidence for a direct link between the effects of the same orthographic phenomenon on speech production and on metalinguistic awareness. Results were strengthened by combining experimental and qualitative data in the study of orthographic effects. Finally, the results show that proficiency predicts orthographic effects, and that orthographic effect predictors vary in naturalistic and instructed contexts.

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their languages should depend on how much they practice each (not merely age of acquisition), and (2) using a L2 more could cause a bilingual to gradually "unlearn" their L1. Using timed picture naming and vocabulary measures, we tracked 139 children for several years as they transitioned from mostly-Spanish homes to mostly-English schools. Following their increased English use, many became more proficient in English than Spanish around the third grade, demonstrating continual learning. But their Spanish also improved, showing that L1-attrition is not inevitable. Incremental learning explains both co-improvement and L1-attrition as consequences of experience-driven learning: improvement from continuing L1 use can offset competitive unlearning.

Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single-language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed-language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and familiar objects in two conditions: identical (both definitions overlap) or related (single definition overlap). Relatedness ratings differed significantly between conditions, but they were highly similar across language contexts. Furthermore, items in the identical condition elicited a P300-like event-related potential component, while related items elicited a wave of lesser amplitude. Critically, the amplitude differences between conditions did not differ between language contexts. No interaction was found with proficiency level across participants. In line with previous findings, we show no measurable impact of mixing languages during the establishment of a link between novel objects and existing conceptual representations in bilinguals.

Recent years have seen an expansion in the research related to structural brain adaptations related to the acquisition and processing of additional languages. However, the accumulating evidence remains to a great extent inconsistent, with a large variety of cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar effects reported in various studies. Here we propose that the variability in the data can be explained by the differences in the language background and experiences of the tested samples. We also propose that the field should move away from monolithic bilingual versus monolingual comparisons; instead, it should focus on the experiences of the bilingual groups as predictors of structural changes in the brain, and also employ longitudinal designs to test the dynamic effects of active bilingualism. The implications of the proposed approaches for the suggested benefits of bilingualism on ageing and patient populations are also discussed.

Several studies found cross-linguistic structural priming with various language combinations. Here, we investigated the role of two important domains of language variation: case marking and word order, for transitive and ditransitive structures. We varied these features in an artificial language learning paradigm, using three different artificial language versions in a between-subjects design. Priming was assessed between Dutch (no overt case marking, SVO word order) and (a) an SVO order version, (b) a case marking version, and (c) an SOV order version. Similar within-language and cross-linguistic priming was found in all versions for transitives, indicating that cross-linguistic structural priming was not hindered. In contrast, for ditransitives we found similar within-language priming for all versions, but no cross-linguistic priming. The finding that cross-linguistic priming is possible between languages that vary in morphological marking or word order, is compatible with studies showing cross-linguistic priming between natural languages that differ on these dimensions.

Although language awareness is typically defined as the explicit understanding of language's functions and conventions, much evidence on the influence of diverse language environments on language awareness has shown implicit understandings of language. In contrast, this study examined whether exposure to linguistic diversity predicted monolingual children's explicit language awareness. We examined four aspects of children's explicit language awareness: ability to label languages, understanding of the communicative consequences of speaking different languages, understanding of labeling conventions, and awareness of their language environment. Participants were monolingual 3- to 5-year-olds (N = 81) who were from (a) a relatively linguistically homogenous community, (b) a relatively linguistically diverse community, or (c) a bilingual household in a relatively linguistically diverse community. Results suggest that community linguistic diversity and home bilingual exposure predict children's explicit language labeling and understanding of labeling conventions but not other aspects of language awareness. These findings provide insight into the role of early language environments in explicit language awareness development.

This article examines the performance of heritage speakers on a bimodal acceptability judgment task that targeted morphologically complex words. A major goal of the study was to compare participants' acceptance of conventional and creative words. Data were collected from 57 adult heritage speakers of Spanish who were subsequently divided into two groups based on language dominance; 18 monolingual native speakers served as a control group. The data were analyzed with a mixed-effects logistic regression model, which showed that item type (conventional vs. creative) had a very strong effect on participants' performance. In addition, there were differences between Spanish-dominant and English-dominant heritage speakers, but only on the creative items. The results are discussed in relation to the Principle of Contrast (Clark, 1987) proposed for first language acquisition and the role of analogy in making acceptability judgments.

Recent decades have seen an increase in research informing our understanding of the complex ways in which bilingual development is shaped by biological, cognitive, and behavioral factors. We investigate the predictors that shape, drive, and constrain the development of the first language (L1) of bilinguals, focusing on 92 Turkish-English bilingual adults with a wide range (0-42) of age at onset (AaO). We tested their productive command of L1 lexical, morphological, and syntactic features, investigating to what extent background variables relating to AaO, experience, and attitudes toward the Turkish language and culture predict the relative level of proficiency across these features. To obtain a comprehensive picture of the interaction of these linguistic and extralinguistic factors, we employed structural equation modeling. We show that for speakers with younger AaOs, exposure-related factors are associated with the level of L1 proficiency they retain as adults; for later bilinguals, exposure-related factors matter less.

Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between parental input and linguistic outcomes and heritage language speakers' bilingualism, multilingualism, and multilectalism; the framing of literacy in the minority language; and the unique and language-shaping experience of minoritization, often an outcome of immigration. I argue that bilingualism is gradient and that better measurement of relevant variables--particularly those related to timing, input/exposure, and literacy--can invigorate the study of heritage language development and make new and more robust insights possible. I propose that heritage speakers and their languages must be understood as connected to minoritized communities and to the experience of inequitable multilingualism.

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of nominal inflection, indicating that the speakers' morphological knowledge had not been sufficiently stabilized due to the return. The second dataset is from one returnee HS who was reimmersed in the German environment after a 4-year stay in Portugal. The comparative analysis of the speaker's performance 13 months after moving away from Germany and 11 months after being reexposed to German revealed a significant decrease of inaccurate case, gender, and plural marking, which supports the hypothesis of restabilization of linguistic knowledge. Overall, the findings emphasize the effects of lack of exposure on the development of HSs' bilingual competence.

When speaking, people often produce gestures that are closely timed with the speech with which they constitute a semantically coherent unit. Analyzing the temporal patterns between the two modalities may reveal insights about how speakers plan them. Using elicited narratives, we tested English/French monolinguals and bilinguals to check whether bilinguals, known to experience a higher degree of competition in lexical access, show a different pattern of gesture-speech alignment compared to that of monolinguals. Results revealed no difference in the temporal patterns between gestures and co-semantic speech for the two language groups. Synchronous gestures were significantly more frequent than asynchronous ones; asynchronous gestures both preceded and followed the correlated speech, yet preceding gestures tended to occur more often. A qualitative analysis conducted for asynchronous gestures revealed that they may serve a rhetoric function. We argue that the variability in gesture-speech timing results from speakers' strategic use of gesture.

This study reports on the conceptualization of a new construct targeting the cross-disciplinary academic language skills most relevant to school reading comprehension, targeting the validation of the Core Academic Language Skills (CALS) Instrument, a novel assessment tool which measures this construct. Participants included Grade 4-8 monolingual English and bilingual students designated as English learners (N = 7,152) from the United States. The study investigated the dimensionality of the core academic language skills construct, the reliability and validity of the CALS Instrument, and the impact of school grade on students' performance in core academic language skills. Results revealed the assessment measure to be unidimensional and to discriminate performance by grade level. This study offers insight into the value of measuring cross-disciplinary school-relevant language proficiency, delineates skills to be targeted through instruction to support reading comprehension, and offers a tool to identify students who will benefit most from this instruction.

This study focused on the phonological awareness skills of 72 Spanish-English and 86 Cantonese-English bilinguals, all enrolled in bilingual and mainstream classrooms in the same schools. Bilinguals were assessed on phonological awareness, decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge of book reading each year from kindergarten until second grade. Individual growth modeling analysis revealed no difference in growth trajectories of English phonological awareness between (a) Spanish-English and Cantonese-English bilinguals and (b) children enrolled in bilingual and mainstream programs. Within-language decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge of book reading were associated with the estimated average initial levels of phonological awareness skills, while only knowledge of book reading had significant effects on the estimated growth trajectory of phonological awareness skills. These findings suggest that young bilinguals with different home languages may have similar growth trajectories in English phonological awareness skills during early elementary school years. The findings have implications for early educational practices.

This study investigated the influence of cognitive ability on bilingual children's vocabulary development in both their languages. Sixty-nine bilingual immigrant children participated, with data collected at three annual intervals. At Time 1, the participants were 5 or 6 years old. Receptive vocabulary was tested in the minority (Turkish, Tarifit) and majority (Dutch) languages. Cognitive measures targeted working memory, selective attention, and executive attention. Cross-lagged correlations were computed to establish the directionality of relationships. Significant partial correlations were followed by stepwise multiple regression analyses in which further control was exerted. Results showed that cognitive ability predicted receptive vocabulary 1 year later. Sequential relationships were found for the majority language only, and attention was more important than working memory. The differential patterns for the two languages set the stage for future research comparing the impact of context, timing, and type of learning on the relationship between cognition and vocabulary development.

We have documented the significant presence of spontaneous and productive use of Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) in the speech of five Tunisian boys with autism, an unusual phenomenon. In typical development, MSA is not fully acquired before the late school years. The Arabic language in Tunisia is in a state of diglossia, and (unlike the colloquial Tunisian Arabic variety) MSA is virtually never used in everyday conversation. Television programs broadcast across the Arabic-speaking world constitute the most important source of MSA for preschool children. Typically developing children require active social interaction to develop language, but some children with autism may use television and cartoons as noninteractional input to acquire language. This study highlighted the existence of a noninteractional language-learning strategy that may partly compensate for the sociopragmatic deficits that characterize autism.

This investigation aimed to provide insights into the controversial debate on the role that age at onset of bilingualism plays in human language capacity with a focus on what it entails for first language (L1) attrition. L1 performance of Turkish immigrants (n = 57) in the United Kingdom with age at onset ranging between 7 and 34 years was compared to that of Turkish monolingual controls (n = 29) across two linguistic properties: structural complexity and accent. Findings generally showed that although the immigrants achieved nativelike proficiency with respect to the overall structural complexity of their L1, this was not the case for accent as those with an earlier age of onset were less likely to sound like native Turkish speakers. We discuss these findings in relation to two competing theoretical models of age effects and suggest that attrition data need to be better accommodated within these models.

Despite contrary research findings, many laypeople still claim that starting second language (L2) instruction early yields linguistic advantages. This assertion is again undermined by a 5-year longitudinal study conducted in Switzerland testing the English language skills of 636 secondary-school students who had all learned Standard German and French at primary school, but only half of whom had learned English from age 8, the remainder having started English 5 years later. The results suggest that age-related attainment effects are overshadowed by other effects, yielding diverse outcomes according to individual differences and contextual effects mediating L2 outcomes. An earlier age of learning proved beneficial only for children raised as biliterate simultaneous bilinguals receiving substantial parental support, as opposed to monolinguals and nonbiliterate bilinguals (simultaneous or sequential). These issues require studies that explore what underlies age effects in L2 learning and investigate how learning contexts shape processes of L2 development.

This article proposes basic (shared) and extended (nonshared) language cognition in native speakers as a function of two types of extralinguistic attributes: (a) degree of being multilingual and (b) variables related to amount and type of literacy experiences (e.g., level of education). This approach may throw new light on the question of whether bilinguals can attain complete or native proficiency in two (or more) languages and the question of whether both early and late second language (L2) learners can attain native levels of L2 proficiency. An adequate language acquisition theory should explain why some structures are and some other structures are not comprehended and produced by all native speakers and also describe the acquisition over time (development) of lexical-grammatical structures comprehended or produced by all native speakers or only by some. It is argued that usage-based linguistics stands a better chance of accomplishing this task than generative linguistics.

Heritage Spanish is often influenced by English, and previous research on late Spanish-English bilinguals suggests that their relative clause attachment preferences in Spanish are affected by English exposure. Nevertheless, recent work with heritage speakers has revealed that early (high-proficiency) Spanish-English bilinguals demonstrate a monolingual-like high-attachment preference in Spanish. Offline data from this self-paced reading study showed the same preference for bilinguals of intermediate proficiency in a meaning-oriented rather than a metalinguistic task. However, unlike in previous research, a group of late bilinguals also showed high-attachment preference, possibly because of insufficient exposure to English. Online data showed no effects for either bilingual group and a nonsignificant numerical trend toward high attachment for a monolingual group. Thus, even moderately proficient heritage speakers seem to be adept at managing interaction between two language systems, so it appears not to affect their interpretation of relative clauses.

To probably overcome the challenge of learning two languages at the same time, infants raised in a bilingual environment pay more attention to the mouth of talking faces than same-age monolinguals. Here we examined the consequences of such preference for monolingual and bilingual infants' ability to perceive nonspeech information coming from the eyes or the mouth region of talking faces. Using a learning procedure, we recorded 15-month-olds' and 18-month-olds' gaze while watching, at each trial, a speaker producing a sentence systematically followed by a nonspeech movement (eyebrow raise vs. lip protrusion). Differences were obtained for infants in the eyebrow-raise condition. While 15-month-old monolinguals and 18-month-old bilinguals learned to anticipate the eyebrow-raise movement before its appearance, 15-month-old bilinguals did not (i.e., they continued to look at the mouth region). Thus, bilingualism appears to impact not only how infants explore talking faces but also how they learn from them.

This study used a brief vocabulary training paradigm to examine two factors for cross-language transfer: how similar the first language (L1) is to the second language (L2) and L1-L2 proficiency levels. Fifty-four sequential bilingual children (aged 6-8) with similar L2 English proficiency levels were assigned to three equal groups: a Vietnamese-English group with low L1 proficiency, a Spanish-English group with low L1 proficiency, and a Spanish-English group with high L1 proficiency. Individual training consisted of two mediated learning experiences conducted in the L1 targeting eight vocabulary items using narrative-based activities. Four of eight target words were cognates between Spanish and English. Pre- and posttesting measured definition quality in the L1 and L2. All groups showed improvement in the L1 following training, but only the Spanish-English group with high L1 proficiency improved in L2 English, revealing a degree of spontaneous cross-language transfer among children with high L1-L2 proficiency.

Languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English ("Jen had her computer fixed") is conveyed using an active structure in Korean ("Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed"), and yet little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such constructions. The present study investigated whether late bilinguals develop shared or language-specific representations for crosslinguistically different (causatives) and similar (transitives) constructions. Using between-language structural priming, Experiment 1 showed that proficient Korean-English bilinguals exhibited a stronger priming effect for transitives than did less proficient bilinguals. Using a picture-sentence verification task, Experiment 2 showed that proficient bilinguals were more likely to apply the rules of Korean causatives to the processing of English causatives than were less proficient bilinguals. Our results suggest that Korean-English bilinguals share syntactic representations for both similar and different constructions, indicating that the bilingual system is highly integrated.

This study examined the sensitivity of Chinese-English bilinguals to derivational word structure in English. In the first experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects for prime-target pairs related both transparently (e.g., "hunter-HUNT") and opaquely (e.g., "corner-CORN") but not for those related purely in terms of form (e.g., "freeze-FREE"), whereas bilinguals showed priming in all three conditions. Furthermore, stronger form priming was found for bilinguals who were less experienced in English. A second experiment showed that bilingual participants found it harder to identify items as nonwords when the words possessed a suffix (e.g., "animalful") than when they did not (e.g., "animalfil"), and this was true in terms of accuracy even for bilinguals with less exposure to English. Overall, these findings suggest that Chinese-English bilinguals, regardless of proficiency, have some sensitivity to morphological structure and that greater proficiency leads to priming effects that tend to pattern more like those of monolinguals.

This study investigated how bilinguals' perception of their first language (L1) differs according to age of reduced contact with L1 after immersion in a second language (L2). Twenty-one L1 Korean-L2 English bilinguals in the United States, ranging in age of reduced contact from 3 to 15 years, and 17 control participants in Korea were tested perceptually on three L1 contrasts differing in similarity to L2 contrasts. Compared to control participants, bilinguals were less accurate on L1-specific contrasts, and their accuracy was significantly correlated with age of reduced contact, an effect most pronounced for the contrast most dissimilar to L2. These findings suggest that the earlier bilinguals are extensively exposed to L2, the less likely they are to perceive L1 sounds accurately. However, this relationship is modulated by crosslinguistic similarity, and a turning point in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition of phonology appears to occur at around age 12.