Languages differ from one another and must therefore be learned. Processing biases in word order can also differ across languages. For example, heavy noun phrases tend to be shifted to late sentence positions in English, but to early positions in Japanese. Although these language differences suggest a role for learning, most accounts of these…

An important psycholinguistic discussion centers on the question of whether bilinguals use the same representations and mechanisms for the languages they speak (the interactive view) or whether the representations and mechanisms for each language are kept strictly separated (the modular view). Empirical investigations of this question have focused…