The left inferior frontal cortex, the caudate and the anterior cingulate have been proposed as the neural origin of language switching, but most of the studies were conducted in low proficient bilinguals. In the present study, we investigated brain areas involved in language switching in a sample of 19 early, high-proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals using a picture naming task that allowed co...

FRICATIVES IN MANDARIN-MIN SIMULTANEOUS BILINGUALS ! Yu-Ying Chuang, Sheng-Fu Wang, & Janice Fon ! Graduate Institute of Linguistics, National Taiwan University [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] !! ABSTRACT This study investigated cross-linguistic interaction in Mandarin-Min simultaneous bilinguals by examining how speech contexts and realizations of Min /z/, which ...

In view of inconsistent findings regarding bilingual advantages in executive functions (EF), we reviewed the literature to determine whether bilinguals' different language usage causes measureable changes in the shifting aspects of EF. By drawing on the theoretical framework of the adaptive control hypothesis-which postulates a critical link between bilinguals' varying demands on language contr...

What are the processes underlying the judgments of translation? And what is the role of language proficiency? This study addresses these questions by examining how Chinese-English bilinguals evaluate poetry translations. Participants were shown haikus in Chinese and the corresponding English translations and were asked to rate the translation quality. The English translations ranged from litera...

We probed simultaneous French-Spanish bilinguals for the perception of Spanish lexical stress using three tasks, two short-term memory encoding tasks and a speeded lexical decision. In all three tasks, the performance of the group of simultaneous bilinguals was intermediate between that of native speakers of Spanish on the one hand and French late learners of Spanish on the other hand. Using a ...

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...

This study investigates whether perceptual learning (e.g. Norris, McQueen & Cutler 2003; Eisner & McQueen 2005; Kraljic & Samuel 2006, 2007; Kraljic, Samuel & Brennan 2008) has crosslinguistic effects in Hindi-English bilinguals. We hypothesized that perceptual learning in bilingual listeners generalizes across languages to similar phonemes in an untrained language. In particular, this study te...

Previous research suggests that bilinguals presented with low and high predictability sentences benefit from semantics in clear but not in conversational speech [1]. In everyday speech, how­ ever, many words are not highly predictable. Previous research has shown that native listeners can use also more subtle seman­ tic contextual information [2]. The present study reports two au­ ditory lexica...

How the brain deals with more than one language and whether we need different or extra brain language sub-networks to support more than one language remain unanswered questions. Here, we investigate structural brain network differences between early bilinguals and monolinguals. Using diffusion-weighted MRI (DW-MRI) tractography techniques and a network-based statistic (NBS) procedure, we found ...

Behavioral studies show that bilinguals are slower and less accurate when performing mental calculation in their nondominant (second; L2) language than in their dominant (first; L1) language. However, little is known about the neural correlates associated with the performance differences observed between bilinguals' 2 languages during arithmetic processing. To address the cortical activation di...