The study involved the analysis of Polish speech samples of 59 Polish-English bilingual children of Polish immigrants to the UK. It aimed to explore differences in phonological performance between these early bilinguals and their Polish monolingual peers. The data collection procedure involved a sentence repetition task. 14 preselected sentences from this task were subsequently analysed auditor...

Previous research has found an advantage for bilinguals relative to monolinguals on tasks of attentional control. This advantage has been found to be larger in older adults than in young adults, suggesting that bilingualism provides a buffer against age-related declines in executive functioning. Using a computerized Stroop task in a nonimmigrant sample of young and older monolinguals and biling...

A lexical decision experiment with Dutch-English bilinguals compared the effect of word frequency on visual word recognition in the first language with that in the second language. Bilinguals showed a considerably larger frequency effect in their second language, even though corpus frequency was matched across languages. Experiment 2 tested monolingual, native speakers of English on the English...

An eye tracking experiment examined how exposure to a second language (L2) influences sentence parsing in the first language. Forty-four monolingual Spanish speakers, 24 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with limited immersion experience in the L2 environment and 20 proficient Spanish–English bilinguals with extensive L2 immersion experience read temporarily ambiguous constructions. The amb...

One hundred and sixty-eight young adult participants were classified as monolingual or bilingual and as having a previously reported clinical diagnosis of ADHD or not to create four groups. All participants completed tests of language proficiency, ADHD ratings, and executive control. Both bilingualism and ADHD are generally associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge, but bilingualism and ADHD ...

It is often assumed that young bilinguals are lexically delayed in comparison to monolinguals. A comprehensive comparison of comprehension and production vocabulary in 31 firstborn bilingual and 30 matched monolingual children fails to find empirical foundation for this assumption. Several raters completed Dutch and French adaptations of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories for c...

The linguistic metaphors of time appear to influence how people gesture about time. This study finds that Chinese English bilinguals produce more vertical gestures when talking about Chinese time references with vertical spatial metaphors than (1) when talking about time conceptions in the English translations, and (2) when talking about Chinese time references with no spatial metaphors. Additi...

Listening conditions affect bilinguals’ speech perception, but relatively little is known about the effect of the combination of several degrading listening conditions. We studied the combined effect of speech rate and background noise on bilinguals’ speech perception in their L1 and L2. Speech perception of twenty Israeli university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew as L2, ...

Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for...