This paper investigates the acquisition of syntax in L2 grammars. We tested adult L2 speakers of Spanish (English L1) on the feature specification of T(ense), which is different in English and Spanish in so-called subject-to-subject raising structures. We present experimental results with the verb parecer "to seem/to appear" in different…

Previous studies have indicated that bilingualism may facilitate lexical learning in adults. The goals of this research were (i) to examine whether bilingual influences on word learning diverge for phonologically-familiar and phonologically-unfamiliar novel words, and (ii) to examine whether increased phonological memory capacity can account for…

Lexical access in bilinguals is known to be largely non-selective. However, most studies in this area have involved bilinguals whose two languages share the same script. This study aimed to examine bilingual lexical access among bilinguals whose two languages have distinct scripts. Korean-English bilinguals were tested in a phoneme monitoring task…

Executive control abilities and lexical access speed in Stroop performance were investigated in English monolinguals and two groups of bilinguals (English-Chinese and Chinese-English) in their first (L1) and second (L2) languages. Predictions were based on a bilingual cognitive advantage hypothesis, implicating cognitive control ability as the…

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals' two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we…

We examined first language (L1) naming of common household objects in three groups of Russian-English bilinguals: early, childhood and late bilinguals. Their naming patterns were compared with those of native speakers of Russian and English, in order to detect possible second language (L2) English influence on L1 Russian naming patterns. We…

Until now, research on bilingual auditory word recognition has been scarce, and although most studies agree that lexical access is language-nonselective, there is less consensus with respect to the influence of potentially constraining factors. The present study investigated the influence of three possible constraints. We tested whether language…

The present study investigates voice onset times (VOTs) to determine if cognates enhance the cross-language phonetic influences in the speech production of a range of Spanish-English bilinguals: Spanish heritage speakers, English heritage speakers, advanced L2 Spanish learners, and advanced L2 English learners. To answer this question, lexical…

Recent years have seen a proliferation of research on attrition in L1 speech (de Leeuw, Mennen & Scobbie, in press; de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen, 2010; Dmitrieva, Jongman & Sereno, 2010; Mennen, 2004). Adding to this line of inquiry, the present study investigates the speech of a 62-year-old bilingual monozygotic twin who emigrated to an L2-speaking…

This self-paced reading study first tested the prediction that the garden path effect previously observed during the processing of subject-object ambiguities in native English would not obtain in a null subject language like Spanish. The investigation then further explored whether the effect would be evident among near-native readers of Spanish…

The authors of "Phrase-final prepositions in Quebec French: An empirical study of contact, code-switching and resistance to convergence", Poplack, Zentz & Dion (2011, this issue), henceforth cited as PZD, make a strong case for showing that, in spite of surface similarities, preposition stranding in Canadian French relative clauses…

This paper examines the influence of age of immersion and proficiency in a second language on speech movement consistency in both a first and a second language. Ten monolingual speakers of English and 20 Bengali-English bilinguals (10 with low L2 proficiency and 10 with high L2 proficiency) participated. Lip movement variability was assessed based…