How do early bilingual experiences influence children's neural architecture for word processing? Dual language acquisition can yield common influences that may be shared across different bilingual groups, as well as language-specific influences stemming from a given language pairing. To investigate these effects, we examined bilingual English…

Language experience shapes infants' abilities to process speech sounds, with universal phonetic discrimination abilities narrowing in the second half of the first year. Brain measures reveal a corresponding change in neural discrimination as the infant brain becomes selectively sensitive to its native language(s). Whether and how bilingual…

Young children engage in essentialist reasoning about natural kinds, believing that many traits are innately determined. This study investigated whether personal experience with second language acquisition could alter children's essentialist biases. In a switched-at-birth paradigm, 5- and 6-year-old monolingual and simultaneous bilingual…