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...

We tested the hypothesis that early bilinguals use language-control brain areas more than monolinguals when performing non-linguistic executive control tasks. We do so by exploring the brain activity of early bilinguals and monolinguals in a task-switching paradigm using an embedded critical trial design. Crucially, the task was designed such that the behavioural performance of the two groups w...

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...

Recent studies suggest that learning and using a second language (L2) can affect brain structure, including the structure of white matter (WM) tracts. This observation comes from research looking at early and older bilingual individuals who have been using both their first and second languages on an everyday basis for many years. This study investigated whether young, highly immersed late bilin...

The bilingual advantage-enhanced cognitive control relative to monolinguals-possibly occurs due to experience engaging general cognitive mechanisms in order to manage two languages. Supporting this hypothesis is evidence that bimodal (signed language-spoken language) bilinguals do not demonstrate such an advantage, presumably because the distinct language modalities reduce conflict and control ...

With the renewed interest in the field of second language learning for the knowledge of collocating words, research findings in favour of holistic processing of formulaic language could support the idea that these language units facilitate efficient language processing. This study investigated the difference between processing of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) of congruent col...

Research on the processing of translations offers important insights on how bilinguals negotiate the representation of words from two languages in one mind and one brain. Evidence so far has shown that translation equivalents effectively activate each other as well as their shared concept even when translations lack of any formal overlap (i.e., non-cognates) and even when one of them is present...

Spanish-English bilinguals were taught academic-type information about History, Biology, Chemistry and Mythology in their two languages. Upon testing, it was found that memory was more accurate and retrieval was faster when the language of retrieval and the language of encoding matched than when they did not match. For accuracy, the pattern of results was influenced by bilinguals’ language prof...

Two studies (Golestani et al., 2007; Wong et al., 2008) have reported a positive correlation between the ability to perceive foreign speech sounds and the volume of Heschl's gyrus (HG), the structure that houses the auditory cortex. More precisely, participants with larger left Heschl's gyri learned consonantal or tonal contrasts faster than those with smaller HG. These studies leave open the q...

The underlying premise of this study was that the two phonetic subsystems of a bilingual interact. The study tested the hypothesis that the vowels a bilingual produces in a second language (L2) may differ from vowels produced by monolingual native speakers of the L2 as the result of either of two mechanisms: phonetic category assimilation or phonetic category dissimilation. Earlier work reveale...