Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

Grammatical agreement makes different demands on speakers of different languages. Being widespread in the languages of the world, the features of agreement systems offer valuable tests of how language affects deep-seated domains of human cognition and categorization. Number agreement is one such domain, with intriguing evidence that typological…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals' L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., "piano") and homographs (e.g., "pan")] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living…

The effects of age of acquisition (AoA) in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages of Spanish--English bilinguals were explored using a translation judgement task in which participants decided whether or not pairs of words in the two languages were translations of each other (i.e., had the same meaning). Experiment 1 found an effect of second…