Studies on bilingual speech processing have implied that bilinguals may either have two separate or one intertwined system. These findings have been obtained by multiple methods using various types of bilinguals. Our study compared monolinguals and two types of bilinguals. We used the same methods for all groups, i.e. we measured attentive identification scores and preattentive discrimination. ...

Bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia symptoms and has thus been characterized as a mechanism for cognitive or brain reserve, although the origin of this reserve is unknown. Studies with young adults generally show that bilingualism is associated with a strengthening of white matter, but there is conflicting evidence for how bilingualism affects white matter in older age. Given that bili...

Language experience fine-tunes how the auditory system processes sound. Bilinguals, relative to monolinguals, have more robust evoked responses to speech that manifest as stronger neural encoding of the fundamental frequency (F0) and greater across-trial consistency. However, it is unknown whether such enhancements increase with increasing second language experience. We predict that F0 amplitud...

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...

This study examined the production of English /b/ and the perception of short-lag English /b d g/ tokens by four groups of bilinguals who differed according to their age of arrival (AOA) in Canada from Italy and amount of self-reported native language (L1) use. A clear difference emerged between early bilinguals (mean AOA= 8 years) and late bilinguals (mean AOA= 20 years). The late bilinguals s...

Many researchers demonstrated the causal effect of bilingualism for working memory ability; bilinguals have higher executive functions in maintaining higher working memory ability. The present research examined the effect of different language types college bilinguals—Chinese–English (two dispersed languages) and Spanish–English (two similar languages) bilinguals for their working memory abilit...

We investigated the behavioral and brain responses (ERPs) of bilingual word recognition to three fundamental psycholinguistic factors, frequency, morphology, and lexicality, in early bilinguals vs. monolinguals. Earlier behavioral studies have reported larger frequency effects in bilinguals' nondominant vs. dominant language and in some studies also when compared to corresponding monolinguals. ...

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monoling...

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monoling...