Emotional words are better remembered than neutral words in the first language. Ferre, Garcia, Fraga, Sanchez-Casas and Molero (2010) found this emotional effect also for second language words by using an encoding task focused on emotionality. The aim of the present study was to test whether the same effect can also be observed with encoding tasks…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the attentional mechanisms of multilingual children with differential degrees of language competence. For this purpose, 118 children (61 female/57 male; mean age 10.9 years (SD = 0.29); early acquisition multilinguals) from the Ladin valleys in South Tyrol, Italy, performed the Attentional Network…

This study compared the comprehension of syntactically simple with more complex sentences in Italian-English adult bilinguals and monolingual controls in the presence or absence of sentence-level interference. The task was to identify the agent of the sentence and we primarily examined the accuracy of response. The target sentence was signalled by…

We present an original model designed to study how a second language (L2) is acquired in bilinguals at different proficiencies starting from an existing L1. The model assumes that the conceptual and lexical aspects of languages are stored separately: conceptual aspects in distinct topologically organized Feature Areas, and lexical aspects in a…

In this study we examined how the introduction of a parallel finger-tapping task influences second language (L2) speech encoding mechanisms and monitoring processes, and how the level of proficiency impacts the efficiency and accuracy of L2 performance under single and dual task conditions. The results indicate that imposing dual task demands had…

We report the results of an affective priming study conducted with proficient sequential German and French bilinguals to assess automatic affective word processing in L1 and L2. Additionally, a semantic priming task was conducted in both languages. Whereas semantic priming effects occurred in L1 and L2, and significant affective priming effects…

A self-paced reading and translation task was used with learners of English as a second language (L2) to explore what sorts of information L2 learners use during online comprehension compared to native speakers, and how task (reading for comprehension vs. translation) and proficiency affect L2 comprehension. Thirty-six Korean native speakers of…

We investigated the influence of word class and translation ambiguity on cross-linguistic representation and processing. Bilingual speakers of English and Spanish performed translation production and translation recognition tasks on nouns and verbs in both languages. Words either had a single translation or more than one translation. Translation…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

In two experiments, we tested the role of lexical repetition, cognates, and second language (L2) proficiency in the priming of code-switches, using the structural priming technique. Dutch-English bilinguals repeated a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then described a target picture by means of a…

Subject-verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examine the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual…

This study investigates the processing of resyllabified words by native English speakers at three proficiency levels in French and by native French speakers. In particular, it examines non-native listeners' development of a parsing procedure for recognizing vowel-initial words in the context of liaison, a process that creates a misalignment of the…

This study examines the effect of proficiency and similarity between the first and the second language on grammatical gender processing in L2. In three experiments, we manipulated gender agreement violations within the determiner phrase (DP), between the determiner and the noun (Experiment 1), the postposed adjective and the noun (Experiment 2)…

Research on the production of subject-verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the…

In this study, we explore native and non-native syntactic processing, paying special attention to the language distance factor. To this end, we compared how native speakers of Basque and highly proficient non-native speakers of Basque who are native speakers of Spanish process certain core aspects of Basque syntax. Our results suggest that…