This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

With the increasing consensus that a single effect of bilingualism is unlikely, some scholars shift their focus to elements that may exert an influence on the bilingual brain. One such element that has been garnering attention lately concerns the role of L1-L2 typological distance. In this conceptual analysis, I make the case that the foundations…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

The present study carried out a bibliometric analysis of L2 eye-tracking research. VOSviewer, CiteSpace, and CitNetExplorer were used for the analysis. The data were 245 articles indexed by Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). The study identified the research topics, trends, promising research directions, influential authors and documents, and…

Research on second-language (L2) acquisition has identified linguistic domains that appear to be especially difficult to learn--one such sticking point being syntactic structures that depend on the surrounding discourse. The Interface Hypothesis (IH) explains what makes such constructions problematic by appealing to a modular view of language,…

Eye tracking technology has become an increasingly popular methodology in language studies. Using data from 27 journals in language sciences indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and/or Scopus, we conducted an in-depth scientometric analysis of 341 research publications together with their 14,866 references between 1994 and 2018. We…

The current study investigated the mechanism of language switching in unbalanced visual unimodal bilinguals as well as balanced and unbalanced bimodal bilinguals during a picture naming task. All three groups exhibited significant switch costs across two languages, with symmetrical switch cost in balanced bimodal bilinguals and asymmetrical switch…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

This article proposes basic (shared) and extended (nonshared) language cognition in native speakers as a function of two types of extralinguistic attributes: (a) degree of being multilingual and (b) variables related to amount and type of literacy experiences (e.g., level of education). This approach may throw new light on the question of whether…

Although increasing literature has suggested that emotion-label words (e.g., anger, delight) and emotion-laden words (e.g., thief, bride) were processed differently in native language (L1), there was a lack of neuroimaging evidence showing such differences in second language (L2). The current study compared the cortical responses to emotion-label…

Bilingual language control refers to how bilinguals are able to speak exclusively in one language without the unintended language intruding. Two prominent verbal theories of bilingual language control have been proposed by researchers: the inhibitory control model (ICM) and the lexical selection mechanism model (LSM). The ICM posits that…

These concluding reflections seek to put the articles of this special issue in a broader context. The article begins by looking at the ideas of cognitive linguistics and linguistic relativity that are invoked. It then considers the questions that arise about the relationship between two or more languages in the same mind, the differences between…

Is there an ideal time window for language acquisition after which nativelike representation and processing are unattainable? Although this question has been heavily debated, no consensus has been reached. Here, we present evidence for a sensitive period in language development and show that it is specific to grammar. We conducted a masked priming…

This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (English or) in negative sentences by Turkish- and German-speaking children. Both children and adults were asked to judge Turkish/German sentences corresponding to the English sentence "This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper." Children acquiring both languages…