We tested the prosodic hypothesis that the temporal alignment of a speaker's beat gestures in a sentence influences syntactic parsing by driving the listener's attention. Participants chose between two possible interpretations of relative-clause (RC) ambiguous sentences, while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. We manipulated the…

Models of language acquisition are constrained by the information that learners can extract from their input. Experiment 1 investigated whether 3-month-old infants are able to encode a repeated, unsegmented sequence of five syllables. Event-related-potentials showed that infants reacted to a change of the initial or the final syllable, but not to…

I will propose a tentative framework of how words in two languages could be organized in the cerebral cortex based on neural assembly theory, according to which neurons that fire synchronously are bound into large-scale distributed functional units (assemblies), which represent a mental event as a whole ("gestalt"). For language this…

In this article, I explore how connectionism might expand its role in second language acquisition (SLA) theory by showing how some symbolic models of bilingual and second language lexical memory can be reduced to a biologically realistic (i.e., neurally plausible) connectionist model. This integration or hybridization of the two models follows the…

Although research has consistently shown that a bilingual's two languages interact on multiple levels, it is also well-established that bilinguals can vary considerably in their proficiency in the second language (L2). In this paper we review empirical studies that have examined how differences in L2 proficiency modulate cross-language…

Studies about bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA) have a long tradition within linguistic and psycholinguistic research. The contributions from psycholinguistic research are crucial to the improvement of neurolinguistic models. This importance stems from the fact that psycholinguistic research is posing more specific questions than…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, and priming) to examine three domains of…

Discusses the most significant findings of recent research and scholarship on the nature of the brain and its relevance to the teaching and learning of human languages. Topics covered include: (1) whether the brain is highly integrated or componential; (2) differences between conscious and unconscious processes; (3) hemispheric specialization; (4)…

This article presents the results of a meta-analysis of 30 hemodynamic experiments comparing first language (L1) and second language (L2) processing in a range of tasks. The results suggest that reliably stronger activation during L2 processing is found (a) only for task-specific subgroups of L2 speakers and (b) within some, but not all regions…