Abstract A growing body of research suggests that bilingualism may afford benefits to certain aspects cognitive functioning. Inconsistent findings arise because methodological differences within and across studies. One limitation is studies often compare linguistically similar languages. The present study recorded brain activity (event-related potentials; ERPs) while English monolinguals, Engli...

This study compares lexical retrieval amongst monolinguals and intermediate bilinguals and advanced bilinguals. It also investigates the possible effects of their language learning strategies on their respective lexical retrieval advantage. The study used a mixed methods design and the groups consisted of 20 Persian near-monolinguals, 20 Persian-English intermediate level bilinguals, and 20 Per...

Verbs and prepositions pose significant challenges in second language learning, as languages differ in how they map these relational terms onto events. Second language learners must put aside their language-specific lens to uncover how a new language operates, perhaps having to rediscover semantic distinctions typically ignored in the first language. The current study examines how the acquisiti...

Children exposed to bilingual input typically learn 2 languages without obvious difficulties. However, it is unclear how preverbal infants cope with the inconsistent input and how bilingualism affects early development. In 3 eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old infants, raised with 2 languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals. ...

This study examined the relationship between performance on standardized measures of language proficiency and conversational measures of the same features used in academic discourse among 24 monolingual and 25 bilingual kindergarteners. Academic discourse performance was considered for both its linguistic and its genre features in two discourse forms: narrative and explanation. Bilinguals perfo...

This study examined executive control in sixty-two 5-year-old children who were monolingual or bilingual using behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. All children performed equivalently on simple response inhibition (gift delay), but bilingual children outperformed monolinguals on interference suppression and complex response inhibition (go/no-go task). On the go/no-go task, E...

One hundred and sixty-eight young adult participants were classified as monolingual or bilingual and as having a previously reported clinical diagnosis of ADHD or not to create four groups. All participants completed tests of language proficiency, ADHD ratings, and executive control. Both bilingualism and ADHD are generally associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge, but bilingualism and ADHD ...

Abstract Bilingual infants rely differently than monolinguals on facial information, such as lip patterns, to differentiate their native languages. This may explain, at least in part, why young and bilinguals show differences social attention. For example, the first year, attend faster more often static faces over non-faces do (Mercure et al., 2018). However, developmental trajectories of these...