How bilinguals switch between languages depends on the context. In a voluntary context, bilinguals are free to decide when to switch, whereas in a cued context they are instructed when to switch. While using two languages may be more costly than using one in cued switching ('mixing cost'), recent evidence suggests that voluntarily using two languages may be less effortful than using one ('mixing benefit'). Direct comparisons between mandatory and voluntary switching, however, are needed to better understand the effects of the interactional context on bilingual language control. The current study compared mandatory and voluntary switching within the same task, thus keeping the overall task characteristics the same. We observed overall slower mandatory responses and larger mandatory than voluntary mixing and switching effects. Thus, using two languages is more costly in a mandatory than voluntary context, showing that the interactional context can affect the effort needed to control two languages.

This study examines bilingual effects in Spanish–English bilingual children with good maintenance of the minority language. The present study compares the performance of a group of Spanish-monolingual children (MON; n = 30) with two groups of Spanish-speaking bilingual children (Low English proficiency group: LEP; n = 36; High English proficiency group, HEP; n = 36) on the elicited productions of Spanish articles and object clitics. Our results suggest that children with LEP performed significantly lower than MON children of the same age on both articles and clitics in Spanish. However, children with HEP, who were a year older on average, performed similarly to the MON group. Both groups of bilingual children produced errors of clitic omission and substitution, but these errors were minimal in the MON group. The results suggest that Spanish clitics and articles are vulnerable to bilingual effects for English/Spanish speaking children with good Spanish maintenance.

The present study examines whether processing a word in one language is affected by the grammatical gender of its translation equivalent in another language. To this end, a group of Catalan–Spanish bilinguals performed a translation–recognition task while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Participants were presented with Catalan and Spanish pairs of words and had to decide if they were translation equivalents. Correct translations included words that were gender congruent (estiuMAS/veranoMAS–summer) or gender incongruent (tardorFEM/otoñoMAS–autumn). The behavioral results showed that participants were faster and more accurate in the gender-congruent condition than in the incongruent condition. The ERP data showed a reduced N400 for the congruent condition. The facilitative effect of gender congruency observed in this study constitutes evidence of the obligatory access to grammatical gender information during bare noun processing and suggests that the bilinguals’ gender systems interact, even in highly proficient early bilinguals.

We investigated changes in self-representation depending on language in Friulian–Italian bilinguals. The Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and the Junior-TCI were administered respectively to 24 adults and 25 children, both in Friulian and in Italian, at a distance of two weeks from each other. Variations in TCI were detected: both adults and children scored higher in Self-Directedness (a character trait) when using Italian than Friulian. Similar findings were observed for Novelty-Seeking (a temperament trait) in children and Cooperativeness (another character trait) in adults. Results are discussed considering previous studies on bilingualism and within the frame of the Friulian sociolinguistic context.

Extending previous research that has examined the relationship between long-term memory and second language (L2) development with a primary focus on accuracy in L2 outcomes, the current study explores the relationship between declarative and procedural memory and accuracy and automatization during L2 practice. Adult English native speakers had learned an artificial language over two weeks (Morgan-Short, Faretta-Stutenberg, Brill-Schuetz, Carpenter & Wong, 2014), producing four sessions of practice data that had not been analyzed previously. Mixed-effects models analyses revealed that declarative memory was positively related to accuracy during comprehension practice. No other relationships were evidenced for accuracy. For automatization, measured by the coefficient of variation (Segalowitz, 2010), the model revealed a positive relationship with procedural memory that became stronger over practice for learners with higher declarative memory but weaker for learners with lower declarative memory. These results provide further insight into the role that long-term memory plays during L2 development.

This paper investigates whether there are changes in gesture rate when speakers of two languages with different gesture rates (Turkish-high gesture; Dutch-low gesture) come into daily contact. We analyzed gestures produced by second-generation heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands in each language, comparing them to monolingual baselines. We did not find differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers, possibly because bilinguals were proficient in both languages and used them frequently – in line with a usage-based approach to language. However, bilinguals produced more deictic gestures than monolinguals in both Turkish and Dutch, which we interpret as a bilingual strategy. Deictic gestures may help organize discourse by placing entities in gesture space and help reduce the cognitive load associated with being bilingual, e.g., inhibition cost. Therefore, gesture rate does not necessarily change in contact situations but might be modulated by frequency of language use, proficiency, and cognitive factors related to being bilingual.

To test the BIA+ and Multilink models’ accounts of how bilinguals process words with different degrees of cross-linguistic orthographic and semantic overlap, we conducted two experiments manipulating stimulus list composition. Dutch–English late bilinguals performed two English lexical decision tasks including the same set of cognates, interlingual homographs, English control words, and pseudowords. In one task, half of the pseudowords were replaced with Dutch words, requiring a ‘no’ response. This change from pure to mixed language list context was found to turn cognate facilitation effects into inhibition. Relative to control words, larger effects were found for cognate pairs with an increasing cross-linguistic form overlap. Identical cognates produced considerably larger effects than non-identical cognates, supporting their special status in the bilingual lexicon. Response patterns for different item types are accounted for in terms of the items’ lexical representation and their binding to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ responses in pure vs mixed lexical decision.

This study investigated the predictive effects of executive functions on bilingual language control processes. We used a flanker task, a switching task and an n-back task to investigate inhibition, shifting, and updating, respectively. We adopted a cued language switching task to investigate the language control processes during bilingual word production. Results of linear mixed effects models showed that picture naming in switch trials was significantly slower and elicited larger stimulus-locked N2 and N400-like components. The results further showed that the flanker effect alone robustly predicted the variability of the N2 but not N400-like switch effects. These findings suggest that domain-general inhibition appears to predict the intensity of inhibition exerted on the lexical items in the non-target language during bilingual word production, but bilingual language control only partially overlaps with executive functions.

This study provides a novel approach for testing the universality of perceptual biases by looking at speech processing in simultaneous bilingual adults learning two languages that support the maintenance of this bias to different degrees. Specifically, we investigated the Iambic/Trochaic Law, an assumed universal grouping bias, in simultaneous French–German bilinguals, presenting them with streams of syllables varying in intensity, duration or neither and asking them whether they perceived them as strong-weak or weak-strong groupings. Results showed robust, consistent grouping preferences. A comparison to monolinguals from previous studies revealed that they pattern with German-speaking monolinguals, and differ from French-speaking monolinguals. The distribution of simultaneous bilinguals' individual performance was best explained by a model fitting a unimodal (not bimodal) distribution, failing to support two subgroups of language dominance. Moreover, neither language experience nor language context predicted their performance. These findings suggest a special role for universal biases in simultaneous bilinguals.

We examine whether early acquisition of a second language (L2) leads to native-like neural processing of phonemic contrasts that are absent in the L1. Four groups (adult and child monolingual speakers of English; adult and child early bilingual speakers of English and Spanish, exposed to both languages before 5 years of age) participated in a study comparing the English /ɪ/ - /ε/ contrast. Neural measures of automatic change detection (Mismatch Negativity, MMN) and attention (Processing Negativity, PN and Late Negativity, LN) were measured by varying whether participants tracked the stimulus stream or not. We observed no effect of bilingualism on the MMN, but adult bilinguals differed significantly from adult monolinguals on neural indices of attention. The child bilinguals were indistinguishable from their monolingual peers. This suggest that learning a L2 before five years of age leads to native-like phoneme discrimination, but bilinguals develop increased attentional sensitivity to speech sounds.

Learning conventional verb-noun combinations in a second language is known to be highly problematic when word choices differ from those in the native language. Grounded on recent proposals of desirable difficulties in vocabulary learning (Bjork & Kroll, 2015), we tested Spanish learners of English on a new paradigm that aimed to induce interference from the native language during lexical selection in a second language, as a way to train regulation of the dominant language. Results showed that recall rates were significantly higher in the group of learners that practiced in conditions of L1-interference. Faster RTs showed more efficient lexical selection in those same learners. Additionally, RTs revealed that the more successful learners in both groups incurred a cost in accessing verb choices congruent with the native language, a finding that is consistent with an inhibitory account.

When people interact, aspects of their speech and language patterns often converge in interactions involving one or more languages. Most studies of speech convergence in conversations have examined monolingual interactions, whereas most studies of bilingual speech convergence have examined spoken responses to prompts. However, it is not uncommon in multilingual communities to converse in two languages, where each speaker primarily produces only one of the two languages. The present study examined complexity matching and lexical matching as two measures of speech convergence in conversations spoken in English, Spanish, or both languages. Complexity matching measured convergence in the hierarchical timing of speech, and lexical matching measured convergence in the frequency distributions of lemmas produced. Both types of matching were found equally in all three language conditions. Taken together, the results indicate that convergence is robust to monolingual and bilingual interactions because it stems from basic mechanisms of coordination and communication.

This study addresses the question of whether and how growing up with more than one language shapes a child's language impairment. Our focus is on Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in bilingual (Turkish–German) children. We specifically investigated a range of phenomena related to the so-called CP (Complementizer Phrase) in German, the hierarchically highest layer of syntactic clause structure, which has been argued to be particularly affected in children with SLI. Spontaneous speech data were examined from bilingual children with SLI in comparison to two comparison groups: (i) typically-developing bilingual children, (ii) monolingual children with SLI. We found that despite persistent difficulty with subject-verb agreement, the two groups of children with SLI did not show any impairment of the CP-domain. We conclude that while subject-verb agreement is a suitable linguistic marker of SLI in German-speaking children, for both monolingual and bilingual ones, ‘vulnerability of the CP-domain’ is not.

Much bilingualism research includes some consideration of codeswitching, which may be measured via self-report, an experimental task, or sociolinguistic interview; however, there is little triangulation across measures in either psycholinguistic or sociolinguistic approaches. To consider possible differences between self-report and oral production of codeswitching, Spanish–English bilinguals completed a codeswitching questionnaire and oral production in an autobiographical memory task. They also completed proficiency and executive function tests. We found that broad measures of self-reported and orally produced codeswitches were positively correlated, although relationships with proficiency and executive function were more complex. These findings may direct future studies’ operationalization of codeswitching.

Previous research examining whether bilinguals exhibit enhanced working memory (WM) compared to monolinguals has yielded mixed results. This inconsistency may be due to lack of sensitivity in behavioral and neuropsychological measures. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of bilingualism on WM by focusing on brain activity patterns (event-related potentials) in monolinguals and bilinguals during a WM task. We recorded brain activity while participants (26 monolingual English speakers and 28 English–French bilinguals) performed a delayed matching-to-sample task. Although performance measures were similar, electrophysiological differences were present across groups. Bilinguals exhibited larger P3b amplitudes than monolinguals, and smaller negative slow wave and N2b amplitudes during retrieval. These results suggest that bilinguals may have more cognitive resources available in WM to allocate to task completion, and that task completion may be less effortful for bilinguals than for monolinguals.

The current study investigates how second language auditory word recognition, in early and highly proficient Spanish–Basque (L1-L2) bilinguals, is influenced by crosslinguistic phonological-lexical interactions and semantic priming. Phonological overlap between a word and its translation equivalent (phonological cognate status), and semantic relatedness of a preceding prime were manipulated. Experiment 1 examined word recognition performance in noisy listening conditions that introduce a high degree of uncertainty, whereas Experiment 2 employed clear listening conditions, with low uncertainty. Under noisy listening conditions, semantic priming effects interacted with phonological cognate status: for word recognition accuracy, a related prime overcame inhibitory effects of phonological overlap between target words and their translations. These findings are consistent with models of bilingual word recognition that incorporate crosslinguistic phonological-lexical-semantic interactions. Moreover, they suggest an interplay between L2-L1 interactions and the integration of information across acoustic and semantic levels of processing in flexibly mapping the speech signal onto the spoken words, under adverse listening conditions.