Purpose: The present study was designed to investigate what linguistic variables best predict bilingual recognition of acoustically degraded sentences and how to identify bilingual individuals who might have more difficulty than their monolingual counterparts on such tasks. Method: Four hundred English speech-perception-in-noise (SPIN) sentences…

Could a second language (L2) influence how bilinguals process their native language (L1)? The work described in this dissertation examined this issue focusing on the way bilinguals interpret the meanings of words. Capitalizing on the prevalence of words that can be translated in more than one way across languages (i.e., "translation ambiguity,"…

This study tested the hypothesis that early language experience facilitates the development of language-specific perceptual weighting strategies believed to be critical for accessing phonetic structure. In turn, that structure allows for efficient storage and retrieval of words in verbal working memory, which is necessary for sentence…