Listening conditions affect bilinguals’ speech perception, but relatively little is known about the effect of the combination of several degrading listening conditions. We studied the combined effect of speech rate and background noise on bilinguals’ speech perception in their L1 and L2. Speech perception of twenty Israeli university students, native speakers of Arabic (L1), with Hebrew as L2, ...

Norris and colleagues have proposed that priming effects observed in the masked prime same–different task are based solely on pre-lexical orthographic information. This proposal was evaluated by examining translation priming effects from non-cognate translation equivalents using both Spanish–English and Japanese–English bilinguals in the same–different task. Although no priming was observed for...

The theoretical status of early bilinguals is an area of some controversy. This study investigates subphonemic variation in Korean and English by monolinguals, and bilinguals who were born in the US (simultaneous), moved to the US as young children (early), or moved to the US during late adolescence (late). Speakers were recorded producing word-initial stops in a phrase-medial context. Measurem...

We tested the hypothesis that early bilinguals use language-control brain areas more than monolinguals when performing non-linguistic executive control tasks. We do so by exploring the brain activity of early bilinguals and monolinguals in a task-switching paradigm using an embedded critical trial design. Crucially, the task was designed such that the behavioural performance of the two groups w...

The effect of number of senses (NoS), a measure of semantic richness, was examined in monolingual English speakers (n = 17) and bilingual speakers of English and French (n = 18). Participants completed lexical decision tasks while EEG was recorded: monolinguals completed the task in English only, and bilinguals completed two lexical decision tasks, one in English and one in French. Effects of N...

Recent studies suggest that learning and using a second language (L2) can affect brain structure, including the structure of white matter (WM) tracts. This observation comes from research looking at early and older bilingual individuals who have been using both their first and second languages on an everyday basis for many years. This study investigated whether young, highly immersed late bilin...

The bilingual advantage-enhanced cognitive control relative to monolinguals-possibly occurs due to experience engaging general cognitive mechanisms in order to manage two languages. Supporting this hypothesis is evidence that bimodal (signed language-spoken language) bilinguals do not demonstrate such an advantage, presumably because the distinct language modalities reduce conflict and control ...

With the renewed interest in the field of second language learning for the knowledge of collocating words, research findings in favour of holistic processing of formulaic language could support the idea that these language units facilitate efficient language processing. This study investigated the difference between processing of a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) of congruent col...

Research on the processing of translations offers important insights on how bilinguals negotiate the representation of words from two languages in one mind and one brain. Evidence so far has shown that translation equivalents effectively activate each other as well as their shared concept even when translations lack of any formal overlap (i.e., non-cognates) and even when one of them is present...

Spanish-English bilinguals were taught academic-type information about History, Biology, Chemistry and Mythology in their two languages. Upon testing, it was found that memory was more accurate and retrieval was faster when the language of retrieval and the language of encoding matched than when they did not match. For accuracy, the pattern of results was influenced by bilinguals’ language prof...