We report on object and action picture-naming accuracy in two groups of bilectal speakers in Cyprus, children with typical language development (TLD) and children with specific language impairment (SLI). Object names were overall better retrieved than action names by both groups. Given that comprehension for action names was relatively intact for…

Whereas most theoretical and computational models assume a continuous flow of activation from concepts to lexical items in spoken word production, one prominent model assumes that the mapping of concepts onto words happens in a discrete fashion (Bloem & La Heij, 2003). Semantic facilitation of context pictures on word translation has been taken to…

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children.…

We investigated whether individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word recognition. While their eye movements were monitored, native English and native French English-French bilinguals listened to English words (e.g., "field") and looked at pictures corresponding to the target, a within-language competitor…

Heritage language acquisition has been characterized by various asymmetries, including the differential acquisition rates of various linguistic areas and the unbalanced acquisition of different categories within a single area. This paper examines Arabic heritage speakers' knowledge of subject-verb agreement versus noun-adjective agreement with the…

Chinese and English speakers seem to hold different conceptions of time which may be related to the different codings of time in the two languages. Employing a sentence-picture matching task, we have investigated this linguistic relativity in Chinese-English bilinguals varying in English proficiency and found that those with high proficiency…

Stimuli used in cued language switching studies typically consist of digits or pictures. However, the comparability between both stimulus types remains unclear. In the present study, we directly compared digit and picture naming in a German-English language switching experiment. Because digits represent a semantic group and contain many cognates,…

This study asked whether bilinguals construct a language-independent level of information structure for the sentences that they produce. It reports an experiment in which a Polish-English bilingual and a confederate of the experimenter took turns to describe pictures to each other and to find those pictures in an array. The confederate produced a…

In recent years, multiple studies have shown that the languages of a bilingual interact during processing. We investigated sign activation as deaf children read words. In a word-picture verification task, we manipulated the underlying sign equivalents. We presented children with word-picture pairs for which the sign translation equivalents varied…

Levy, Mc Veigh, Marful and Andreson (2007) found that naming pictures in L2 impaired subsequent recall of the L1 translation words. This was interpreted as evidence for a domain-general inhibitory mechanism (RIF) underlying first language attrition. Because this result is at odds with some previous findings and theoretical assumptions, we wanted…

This study investigated correspondence between different measures of bilingual language proficiency contrasting self-report, proficiency interview, and picture naming skills. Fifty-two young (Experiment 1) and 20 aging (Experiment 2) Spanish-English bilinguals provided self-ratings of proficiency level, were interviewed for spoken proficiency, and…

In two experiments, we tested the role of lexical repetition, cognates, and second language (L2) proficiency in the priming of code-switches, using the structural priming technique. Dutch-English bilinguals repeated a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then described a target picture by means of a…

Although all bilinguals encounter cross-language interference (CLI), some bilinguals are more susceptible to interference than others. Here, we report on language performance of late bilinguals (Russian/German) on two bilingual tasks (interview, verbal fluency), their language use and switching habits. The only between-group difference was CLI:…

Two groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (3-5-year-olds, 6-8-year-olds) participated in a picture identification task and a picture naming task in both languages. Results revealed age-related growth in English, but not Mandarin vocabulary. Composite vocabulary was larger than either single-language vocabulary in the younger children but…

This study investigated the encoding strategies employed by Chinese and English language users when recalling sequences of pictured objects. The working memory performance of native English participants (n = 14) and Chinese speakers of English as a second language (Chinese ESL; n = 14) was compared using serial recall of visually-presented…