Second-language (L2) knowledge of English is an essential communication tool in the contemporary era of globalization in many research and business fields. Among the important tasks in English education is the measurement of student proficiency. While various tests purport to measure proficiency in learning English, repeated preparation and…

Adult learners of a new language (L2) tend not to achieve target-like knowledge and performance, so the cognitive status of L2s has long been debated. While monolingual native (L1) speakers robustly apply their grammatical knowledge to input as it unfolds, there are competing claims about whether L2 speakers also do so reflexively (Dekydtspotter,…

Language is a quintessentially human trait. Many decades of neurolinguistic research provided evidence of neural structures which specialize in complex linguistic and cognitive processes supporting human communications. Because the world is multilingual, (Crystal, 2010; de Bot, 2019) a prominent question related to brain processes supporting…

Early childhood language experiences influence how a child's mind and brain process language and acquire literacy. For children growing up bilingual, their two languages interact in their minds, and these cross-linguistic influences can lead to unique neurocognitive mechanisms for language and reading compared to monolinguals. In this…

In the present study, we examined modulations of the second language (L2) positive emotion-label words, positive emotion-laden words, and neutral words on conflict processing in a flanker task. Twenty Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to decide the color of the central words that were vertically surrounded by the same words with the same…

For centuries, adults may have relied on pedagogies that promote rote memory for the learning of foreign languages through word associations and grammar rules. This contrasts sharply with child language learning which unfolds in socially interactive contexts. In this paper, we advocate an approach to study the social brain of language by grounding…

Cognitive flexibility (switching) and control (inhibition) are among widely accepted cognitive advantages of bilingualism. Switch Cost (SC), i.e., the time difference to complete a switch versus non-switch task, is a construct for measuring the switching ability. The need to control the interference and switching between one's languages leads to…

There is substantial behavioral evidence for a phenomenon commonly called "the testing effect", i.e. superior memory performance after repeated testing compared to re-study of to-be-learned materials. However, considerably less is known about the underlying neuro-cognitive processes that are involved in the initial testing phase, and…

This Event Related Potentials (ERP) study investigates auditory processing of sentences with so-called code-switches in Russian learners of German. It has often been argued that switching between two languages results in extra processing cost, although it is not completely clear yet what exactly causes these costs. ERP presents a good method to…

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…

Despite the number of articles devoted to the topic of content-based instruction (CBI), little attempt has been made to link the claims for CBI to research in cognitive science. In this article, I review the CBI model of foreign language (FL) instruction in the context of its close alignment with two emergent frameworks in cognitive science:…

This article provides a selective overview of recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies in L2 morpho-syntax, demonstrating that the ERP evidence supporting the critical period hypothesis (CPH) may be less compelling than previously thought. The article starts with a general introduction to ERP methodology and language-related ERP profiles…

Different theoretical accounts of second language (L2) acquisition differ with respect to whether or not advanced learners are predicted to show native-like processing for features not instantiated in the native language (L1). We examined how native speakers of English, a language with number but not gender agreement, process number and gender…

Functional connectivity changes in the language network (Price, 2010), and in a control network involved in second language (L2) processing (Abutalebi & Green, 2007) were examined in a group of Persian (L1) speakers learning French (L2) words. Measures of network integration that characterize the global integrative state of a network (Marrelec,…

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., and ). The present study examined the…