What absent switch costs and mixing costs during bilingual language comprehension can tell us about language control.

What baboons can (not) tell us about natural language grammars.

Rey et al. (2012) present data from a study with baboons that they interpret in support of the idea that center-embedded structures in human language have their origin in low level memory mechanisms and associative learning. Critically, the authors claim that the baboons showed a behavioral preference that is consistent with center-embedded sequences over other types of sequences. We argue that...

Language Use: What can it tell us?

Language Contact, and Learning to Speak: What Pidgins Can Tell Us about Second Language Learning

reasoning. Furthermore, they acquire these linguistic formalisms at an astonishingly rapid pace, and with fairly limited input (Mitchell et al. 2013: 30-31). Empirical validation for Chomsky’s claim can be found in a famous study conducted by Stephen Crain and Mineharu Nakayama (1987). The study documented cases in which neurotypical children as young as three years old produced yes/no question...

What eye movements can tell us about sentence comprehension.

Eye movement data have proven to be very useful for investigating human sentence processing. Eyetracking research has addressed a wide range of questions, such as recovery mechanisms following garden-pathing, the timing of processes driving comprehension, the role of anticipation and expectation in parsing, the role of semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic information, and so on. However, there are...

What bilinguals tell us about culture, cognition, and language.

In the last 25 years, cognitive scientists have come to see that usingmore than one language is a natural circumstance of human experience, not an exceptional condition that produces disordered speaking or thinking (1). The revision of previously held negative views about bilingualism is largely attributable to the finding that although bilinguals appear to activate both languages when reading,...