This experimental study tests the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) using two constructions whose appropriateness depends on monitoring discourse information: Clitic Left Dislocation and Fronted Focus. Clitic Left Dislocation relates a dislocated and clitic-doubled object to an antecedent activated in previous discourse, while Fronted Focus does not relate the fronted...

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 ...

This paper discusses a common reality in many cases of multilingualism: heritage speakers, or unbalanced bilinguals, simultaneous or sequential, who shifted early in childhood from one language (their heritage language) to their dominant language (the language of their speech community). To demonstrate the relevance of heritage linguistics to the study of linguistic competence more broadly defi...

This paper considers the frequency and loudness of incomings by next-speakers in overlapping conversation. The speech of Welsh-English bilinguals is examined using a combination of instrumental and impressionistic acoustic analysis. Previous research has found that in some varieties of English, incomings by the next speaker can be designed with high pitch and loud volume. The conversation analy...

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...

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a between-languagemasked semantic priming lexical...

Bilingualism represents an interesting model of possible experience-dependent alterations in brain structure. The current study examines whether interhemispheric adaptations in brain structure are associated with bilingualism. Corpus callosum volume and cortical thickness asymmetry across 13 regions of interest (selected to include critical language and bilingual cognitive control areas) were m...