The current study examined the impact of language experience on the ability to efficiently search for objects in the face of distractions. Monolingual and bilingual participants completed an ecologically-valid, object-finding task that contained conflicting, consistent, or neutral auditory cues. Bilinguals were faster than monolinguals at locating the target item, and eye movements revealed tha...

Here, we review the neural correlates of cognitive control associated with bilingualism. We demonstrate that lifelong practice managing two languages orchestrates global changes to both the structure and function of the brain. Compared with monolinguals, bilinguals generally show greater gray matter volume, especially in perceptual/motor regions, greater white matter integrity, and greater func...

Behavioral research suggests that monolinguals and bilinguals differ in how they manage within-language phonological competition when listening to language. The current study explored whether bilingual experience might also change the neural resources recruited to control spoken-word competition. Seventeen Spanish-English bilinguals and eighteen English monolinguals completed an fMRI task in wh...

Auditory processing is presumed to be influenced by cognitive processes - including attentional control - in a top-down manner. In bilinguals, activation of both languages during daily communication hones inhibitory skills, which subsequently bolster attentional control. We hypothesize that the heightened attentional demands of bilingual communication strengthens connections between cognitive (...

*Correspondence: Thomas H. Bak, Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, UK e-mail: [email protected] Recent studies, using predominantly visual tasks, indicate that early bilinguals tend to outperform monolinguals on attention tests. It remains less clear whether such advantages extend to those bilinguals who have acquired t...

The present study examines cross-linguistic articulation rates in read speech among 28 native speakers (14 English and 14 Japanese) and 14 Japanese-English near-balanced bilinguals. The results show that: (1) articulation rates are comparable between the native speakers and the bilinguals; (2) there was a significant difference of articulation rates in Japanese and English among the bilinguals;...

The objective of this study was to determine how bilinguals' age at the time of language acquisition influenced the organization of their phonetic system(s). The productions of six English and five Korean vowels by English and Korean monolinguals were compared to the productions of the same vowels by early and late Korean-English bilinguals varying in amount of exposure to their second language...

Previous research with unbalanced, different-script bilinguals has typically produced null L2-L1 noncognate masked translation priming effects in lexical decision tasks (LDT). Two novel models of the bilingual mental lexicon have emerged to account for these null results: the episodic L2 hypothesis and the Sense model. In contrast, the BIA+ model predicts significant priming whenever bilinguals...

The goal of the present work was to examine the effects of bilingualism on adults' ability to resolve cross-linguistic inconsistencies in orthography-to-phonology mappings during novel-word learning. English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals learned artificially constructed novel words that overlapped with English orthographically but diverged from English phonologically. Native-langu...

This article provides an overview of the psycholinguistic research concerning the processes and representations that bilinguals use while processing language. We review the lexical, semantic, and syntactic levels of bilingual processing. The main conclusion from this review is that the different languages of bilinguals strongly influence each other during processing. Therefore, we end with a br...