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 ...

BACKGROUND In their daily communication, bilinguals switch between two languages, a process that involves the selection of a target language and minimization of interference from a nontarget language. Previous studies have uncovered the neural structure in bilinguals and the activation patterns associated with performing verbal conflict tasks. One question that remains, however is whether this ...

Bilinguals have been shown to exhibit a performance advantage on executive control tasks, outperforming their monolingual counterparts. Although a wealth of research has investigated this 'bilingual advantage' behaviourally, electrophysiological correlates are lacking. Using EEG with a Stroop task that manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of word and colour presentation, the current ...

During spoken language comprehension, auditory input activates a bilingual's two languages in parallel based on phonological representations that are shared across languages. However, it is unclear whether bilinguals access phonotactic constraints from the non-target language during target language processing. For example, in Spanish, words with s+ consonant onsets cannot exist, and phonotactic...

Number representations change through education, although it is currently unclear whether and how language could impact the magnitude representation that we share with other species. The most prominent view is that language does not play any role in modulating the core numeric representation involved in the contrast of quantities. Nevertheless, possible cultural hints on the numerical magnitude...

UNLABELLED The brain basis of bilinguals' ability to use two languages at the same time has been a hotly debated topic. On the one hand, behavioral research has suggested that bilingual dual language use involves complex and highly principled linguistic processes. On the other hand, brain-imaging research has revealed that bilingual language switching involves neural activations in brain areas ...

Previous research demonstrates that bilinguals have an advatange over monolinguals in several extra-linguistic domains. Using the Simon Task, which putatively measures inhibitory control, Bialystok, Craik, Klein, and Viswanathan (2004) illustrate that early bilinguals are faster and show less of a Simon effect than monolinguals, a disparity that becomes more pronounced in late adulthood. The po...

Languages differ in the way they package elements of the world into words, which poses a challenge for bilinguals. We examined word use patterns for common household objects for late-immersed Chinese-English bilinguals to investigate how the bilingual lexical network develops when the first language is fully mature at the time of second-language immersion. We found changes to both firstand seco...

Coderre and van Heuven (2014) concluded that the orthographic overlap between a bilingual’s two languages is an important variable to consider in investigations of bilingual executive control (EC) abilities. Since greater overlap creates more cross-linguistic activation and (presumably) increases the daily demands of cognitive control Coderre and van Heuven hypothesize that similar-script bilin...

Research on the phonetics of code-switching has focused on voice onset time (VOT) and has yielded mixed results regarding cross-language interaction, possibly due to differences in data used (scripted vs. spontaneous speech) and populations examined (L1 vs. L2 dominant, early vs. late bilinguals). Here VOT was measured in a corpus of spontaneous code-switching speech elicited from a homogeneous...