In two experiments, we examined inhibitory control processes in three groups of bilinguals and trilinguals that differed in nonnative language proficiency and language learning background. German 5- to 8-year-old second-language learners of English, German-English bilinguals, German-English-Language X trilinguals, and 6- to 8-year-old German monolinguals performed the Simon task and the Attenti...

Decades of research have shown that, from an early age, proficient bilinguals can speak each of their two languages separately (similar to monolinguals) or rapidly switch between them (dissimilar to monolinguals). Thus we ask, do monolingual and bilingual brains process language similarly or dissimilarly, and is this affected by the language context? Using an innovative brain imaging technology...

Previous studies have demonstrated a bilingual advantage in the efficiency of executive attention. A question remains, however, about the impact of the age of L2 acquisition and relative balance of the two languages on the enhancement of executive functions in bilinguals, and whether this is modulated by the similarity of the bilingual's two languages. The present study explores these issues by...

The current study examines the relation between cognitive control and linguistic competition resolution at the sublexical level in bilinguals. Twenty-one Spanish-English bilinguals and 23 English monolinguals completed a non-linguistic Stroop task (indexing inhibitory control) and a linguistic priming/lexical decision task (indexing Spanish phonotactic constraint competition during English comp...

Semantic and lexical decision tasks were used to investigate the mechanisms underlying code-blend facilitation: the finding that hearing bimodal bilinguals comprehend signs in American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English words more quickly when they are presented together simultaneously than when each is presented alone. More robust facilitation effects were observed for semantic decision th...

Two meta-analyses of 66 behavioral studies examined variables influencing functional cerebral lateralization of each language of brain-intact bilingual adults. Functional lateralization was found to be primarily influenced by age of onset of bilingualism: bilinguals who acquired both languages by 6 years of age showed bilateral hemispheric involvement for both languages, whereas those who acqui...

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (...

The current study examines whether bilingual word recognition in spoken sentences is influenced by cross-lingual phonological similarity. ERPs were measured while GermanEnglish bilinguals listened to German sentences. Target words in the sentences were either German-English homophones (e.g., eagle – Igel ‘hedgehog’), German words that were phonologically closely related to English words (e.g., ...

Using a masked phonological priming paradigm, Brysbaert, Van Dyck, and Van de Poel (1999) showed that Dutch-French bilinguals perform better at identifying tachistoscopically presented L2 words (e.g., oui [yes]) when those words are primed by L1 words or nonwords that are homophonic to the L2 target word according to the L1 grapheme-phoneme conversion rules (e.g., wie [who]). They noted that th...

IN ORDER TO COMPARE CONCEPTS OF MEANING SIMILARITY OF ENGLISH AND NAVAHO BILINGUALS, AN EXPERIMENT WAS CONDUCTED IN NORTHERN ARIZONA WITH 57 NAVAHO EIGHTH GRADERS. THEY WERE CLASSIFIED AS EITHER "COMPOUND" OR "COORDINATE" BILINGUALS ACCORDING TO WHETHER THEY HAD ASSIMILATED TWO LANGUAGES IN ASSOCIATED CONTEXTS OR IN DISSOCIATED CONTEXTS. THE STUDY'WAS DESIGNED TO INVESTIGATE THE SCOPE OF SEMANT...