Bilinguals outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information, with advantages likely deriving from cognitive mechanisms employed during bilingual processing. In this study, monolinguals’ and bilinguals’ inhibition performance was compared on two nonlinguistic inhibition tasks: a Stroop-like task (with perceptual conflict among stimulus features) and a Simon-like task (with stim...

The authors induced tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) for English words in monolinguals and bilinguals using picture stimuli with cognate (e.g., vampire, which is vampiro in Spanish) and noncognate (e.g., funnel, which is embudo in Spanish) names. Bilinguals had more TOTs than did monolinguals unless the target pictures had translatable cognate names, and bilinguals had fewer TOTs for noncognates...

We describe sister machine translation prototypes, Ntran, an English to Japanese system developed at UMIST, and Aidtrans, Japanese to English, at Sheffield, both designed for use by an English monolingual. Aidtraus uses extensive and sophisticated collocational analysis radically to reduce the need for conventional post-editing. Ntran offers interactive query at three stages: on-line dictionary...

Here, we review the neural correlates of cognitive control associated with bilingualism. We demonstrate that lifelong practice managing two languages orchestrates global changes to both the structure and function of the brain. Compared with monolinguals, bilinguals generally show greater gray matter volume, especially in perceptual/motor regions, greater white matter integrity, and greater func...

Behavioral research suggests that monolinguals and bilinguals differ in how they manage within-language phonological competition when listening to language. The current study explored whether bilingual experience might also change the neural resources recruited to control spoken-word competition. Seventeen Spanish-English bilinguals and eighteen English monolinguals completed an fMRI task in wh...

This study examined whether Spanish-English bilinguals are able to fully differentiate Spanish and English /t/ according to voice-onset time (VOT) if they learn English as a second language (L2) in early childhood. In experiment 1, VOT was measured in Spanish words spoken by Spanish monolinguals, in English words spoken by English monolinguals, and in Spanish and English words spoken by bilingu...

Bilinguals report more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) failures than monolinguals. Three accounts of this disadvantage are that bilinguals experience between-language interference at (a) semantic and/or (b) phonological levels, or (c) that bilinguals use each language less frequently than monolinguals. Bilinguals who speak one language and sign another help decide between these alternatives because the...

Bilinguals have been argued to show a cognitive advantage over monolinguals, although this notion has recently been called into question. In many studies, bilinguals and monolinguals vary on background variables. Moreover, most studies do not distinguish between potential effects of language knowledge and language use. We examined the effects of bilingualism on executive control in older adults...

Monolinguals and bilinguals differ along a number of dimensions, including way they label existing object categories (Pavlenko & Malt, 2011). In the present study, we ask whether English monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, and English-Spanish bilinguals also differ in the way they use language when forming novel categories. Previous research with monolinguals shows that a shared label enc...