The theoretical status of early bilinguals is an area of some controversy. This study investigates subphonemic variation in Korean and English by monolinguals, and bilinguals who were born in the US (simultaneous), moved to the US as young children (early), or moved to the US during late adolescence (late). Speakers were recorded producing word-initial stops in a phrase-medial context. Measurem...

Comparisons of cognitive processing in monolinguals and bilinguals have revealed a bilingual advantage in inhibitory control. Recent studies have demonstrated advantages associated with exposure to two languages in infancy. However, the domain specificity and scope of the infant bilingual advantage in infancy remains unclear. In the present study, 114 monolingual and bilingual infants were comp...

The current study examined the impact of language experience on the ability to efficiently search for objects in the face of distractions. Monolingual and bilingual participants completed an ecologically-valid, object-finding task that contained conflicting, consistent, or neutral auditory cues. Bilinguals were faster than monolinguals at locating the target item, and eye movements revealed tha...

Mapping of written input onto orthographic representations was examined in bilingual speakers whose two languages have partially overlapping orthographies. Russian-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were tested with a modified version of the picture-word interference paradigm, adapted for use with eye-tracking. Compared to English monolinguals, Russian-English bilinguals (tested in Eng...

The effect of number of senses (NoS), a measure of semantic richness, was examined in monolingual English speakers (n = 17) and bilingual speakers of English and French (n = 18). Participants completed lexical decision tasks while EEG was recorded: monolinguals completed the task in English only, and bilinguals completed two lexical decision tasks, one in English and one in French. Effects of N...

Auditory processing is presumed to be influenced by cognitive processes - including attentional control - in a top-down manner. In bilinguals, activation of both languages during daily communication hones inhibitory skills, which subsequently bolster attentional control. We hypothesize that the heightened attentional demands of bilingual communication strengthens connections between cognitive (...

Bilingual and monolingual children's (mean age=4;10) elicited production of the past tense in both English and French was examined in order to test predictions from Usage-Based theory regarding the sensitivity of children's acquisition rates to input factors such as variation in exposure time and the type/token frequency of morphosyntactic structures. Both bilingual and monolingual children wer...

We examined whether a bilingual advantage can be found in older bilinguals that share the same cultural background with monolinguals. Sixteen Gaelic-English bilinguals over the age of 60 years were compared with three monolingual control groups in performance on the Simon task, as well as in general intelligence and socio-economic status. Some of the monolinguals were bidialectal allowing us to...

This study explores syntactic, pragmatic, and lexical influences on adherence to SV and VS orders in native and fluent L2 speakers of Spanish. A judgment task examined 20 native monolingual and 20 longstanding L2 bilingual Spanish speakers' acceptance of SV and VS structures. Seventy-six distinct verbs were tested under a combination of syntactic and pragmatic constraints. Our findings challeng...

Early second language (EL2) learners generally perform more poorly than monolinguals in specific language domains, presenting similarities with children affected by specific language impairment (SLI). As a consequence, it can be difficult to correctly diagnose this disorder in EL2 children. The current study investigated the performance of 120 EL2 and 40 age-matched monolingual children in obje...