We use a time-course analysis to examine the roles of vocabulary size and executive control in bilinguals' verbal fluency performance. Two groups of bilinguals and a group of monolingual adults were tested in English with verbal fluency subtests from the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System. The two bilingual groups were equivalent in their…

Immediate and lasting effects of music or second-language training were examined in early childhood using event-related potentials. Event-related potentials were recorded for French vowels and musical notes in a passive oddball paradigm in thirty-six 4- to 6-year-old children who received either French or music training. Following training, both…

Two studies are reported in which monolingual and bilingual children (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) completed a memory task involving proactive interference. In both cases, the bilinguals attained lower scores on a vocabulary test than monolinguals but performed the same on the proactive interference task. For the children, bilinguals made fewer…

Bilingual children have been shown to outperform monolingual children on tasks measuring executive functioning skills. This advantage is usually attributed to bilinguals' extensive practice in exercising selective attention and cognitive flexibility during language use because both languages are active when one of them is being used. We examined…

Two studies are reported that explore the effect of bilingualism on memory performance. Following previous reports of a bilingual advantage in executive control that sometimes shows a greater advantage in older adults, we compared younger and older monolinguals and bilinguals on a memory paradigm that yielded separate measures of familiarity and…

To examine the effects of bilingualism on cognitive control, we studied monolingual and bilingual young adults performing a flanker task with functional MRI. The trial types of primary interest for this report were incongruent and no-go trials, representing interference suppression and response inhibition, respectively. Response times were similar…

Bilinguals must have a mechanism for controlling attention to their two language systems in order to achieve fluent performance in each language without intrusions from the other. This paper examines the evidence that the experience of controlling attention to two languages boosts the development of executive control processes in childhood for…

A grammaticality judgment test based on five structures of English grammar was administered in oral and written form. Two groups were formed by separating participants who began learning English at younger and older than 15 years of age. Performance patterns were different for the two groups, the linguistic structure tested affected participants'…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…

This study claimed that the ability of bilingual children to solve metalinguistic problems depends upon the demands of a given problem for analysis of knowledge or control of processing. It examined two hypotheses concerning bilingualism and metalinguistic problem-solving: (1) that bilingual children would be more advanced than monolingual…

A framework for second-language acquisition (SLA) features cognitive processing components: process of analysis and process of control. These processes lead to changes in mental representations that are the basis of learning. The framework can be applied to similarity of first- and second-language learning, the starting point for SLA,…

Identifies three areas of research relevant to examining literacy acquisition in bilinguals, explains the contributions of each, and associates each with a skill required by monolingual and bilingual children in the development of literacy acquisition skills. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates the role of inferencing in cloze test performance and the factors that facilitate that inferencing. Four groups of high school students learning French as a second language completed sets of cloze passages under four treatment conditions. Three conditions provided a potential cue to inferencing, while the fourth was a…

Evaluates the distinction between competence theories and processing theories of second-language acquisition by examining Chomsky's definitions for competence and performance, and by setting out criteria for competence theories. (70 references) (JL)

Investigates the metalinguistic ability of monolingual or bilingual children between five and nine years of age on two language tasks (grammaticality judgment and correction). (HOD)