This study addressed the debate on the primacy of syllable vs. segment (i.e., phoneme) as a functional unit of phonological encoding in syllabic languages by investigating both behavioral and neural responses of Dutch-Cantonese (DC) bilinguals in a color-object picture naming task. Specifically, we investigated whether DC bilinguals exhibit the phonemic processing strategy, evident in monolingu...

This study examines age of acquisition (AoA) in Spanish-English bilinguals' phonetic and phonological knowledge of /l/ in English and Spanish. In English, the lateral approximant /l/ varies in darkness by context [based on the second formant (F2) and the difference between F2 and the first formant (F1)], but the Spanish /l/ does not. Further, English /l/ is overall darker than Spanish /l/. Thir...

The present study examined early vocabulary development in fifty-nine French monolingual and fifty French-English bilingual infants (1;4-1;6). Vocabulary comprehension was assessed using both parental report (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory; CDI) and the Computerized Comprehension Task (CCT). When assessing receptive vocabulary development using parental report, the bilingua...

Abstract Bilinguals’ two languages seem to be coactivated in parallel during reading, speaking, and listening. However, this coactivation writing has been scarcely studied. This study aimed assess orthographic spelling-to-dictation. We took advantage of the presence polyvalent graphemes Spanish (one phonological representation with specifications, e.g., / b /for both v b) manipulate congruency....

ISSN: 1479-0718 (Print) 1747-7530 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmjm20 How does pragmatic competence develop in bilinguals? Istvan Kecskes To cite this article: Istvan Kecskes (2015): How does pragmatic competence develop in bilinguals?, International Journal of Multilingualism, DOI: 10.1080/14790718.2015.1071018 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/147...

Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels, systematically reducing unstressed vowels to th...

PURPOSE English and Mandarin are the 2 most spoken languages in the world, yet it is not known how stuttering manifests in English-Mandarin bilinguals. In this research, the authors investigated whether the severity and type of stuttering is different in English and Mandarin in English-Mandarin bilinguals, and whether this difference was influenced by language dominance. METHOD Thirty English...

The primary aim of this study was to determine if fluent early bilinguals who are highly experienced in their second language (L2) can produce L2 vowels in a way that is indistinguishable from native speakers' vowels. The subjects were native speakers of Italian who began learning English when they immigrated to Canada as children or adults ('early' vs. 'late' bilinguals). The early bilinguals ...