Editorial: Learning a non-native language in a naturalistic environment: insights from behavioral and neuroimaging research

Citation: Pliatsikas C and Chondrogianni V (2015) Editorial: Learning a non-native language in a naturalistic environment: insights from behavioral and neuroimaging research. Research on bilingualism has boomed in the past two decades. The processes by which a second language is acquired and processed has been investigated via linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic perspectives, focusing not only on second language (L2) acquisition and processing, but also the effects it might have on cognition and brain structure and function (Bialystok et al., 2012). More recent studies have focused on the effects of experience-based factors on L2 acquisition and processing (Dussias and Piñar, 2009); for example, several studies have increasingly focused on how L2 processing is affected by the active and continuous use of L2, or immersion, whether it becomes native-like, and which language domains are particularly affected (Dussias and Sagarra, 2007; Pliatsikas and Marinis, 2013). The present E-Book is a collection of recent studies that demonstrate the effects of immersive L2 learning in lexical, phonological and morpho-syntactic processing, while at the same time discusses the potential effects of immersive non-native acquisition on the structure of the bilingual brain. Several studies in this E-Book have focused on morpho-syntactic processing by immersed late L2 learners. In an ERP study, Carrasco-Ortiz and Frenck-Mestre (2014) showed that highly proficient L2 learners of French with limited immersion (5–6 months) were native-like in their sensitivity of detecting verbal inflectional errors. This sensitivity was enhanced in the presence of phonological cues to the errors, but was also dependent on the L2 learner's overall proficiency. Further evidence in the domain of morpho-syntax was provided in an ERP experiment by Meulman et al. (2014), who demonstrated that immersed (5 years) late Romance learners of Dutch were native-like in detecting auditorily-presented verb agreement violations in non-finite verbs, but not gender violations. This demonstrated that there might be limits to how native-like L2 processing can be, but these limits are specific to the grammatical construction under investigation. In two behavioral masked lexical priming experiments and in an ERP study with advanced Spanish and German late L2 learners of English, De Cat et al. (2015) showed that lexically transparent noun-noun compounds (NNCs) such as moon dust are processed combinatorially by advanced non-native speakers similarly to native speakers; however, sensitivity to word order violations within the NNCs was modulated by the learners' L1. In an acceptability judgment task, Parafita Couto et al. (2015) examined the interaction …