Reaction time (RT) and the N400 ERP component were measured to examine age-related differences in bilingual language processing. Although young bilinguals appear to access both languages simultaneously (i.e., non-selective access), little is known about language selection in older adults. The effect of language context on language selectivity was investigated using interlingual homographs (IH; ...

Bilingual first language learners face unique challenges that may influence the rate and order of early word learning relative to monolinguals. A comparison of the productive vocabularies of 435 children between the ages of 6 months and 7 years-181 of which were bilingual English learners-found that monolinguals learned both English words and all-language concepts faster than bilinguals. Howeve...

Previous research suggests that bilinguals demonstrate superior cognitive control processes than monolinguals. The goal of the current investigation was to examine whether this "bilingual advantage" is observed in a language processing task that requires inhibition, i.e., lexical ambiguity processing. Monolingual and bilingual participants read sentences that biased the reading of a terminal ho...

We assessed the English vocabulary and verbal fluency of college students who were either bilinguals who were born abroad and spoke English or monolingual speakers of English. We examined the relationship between age of arrival to the U.S. of bilinguals and their English vocabulary. The bilinguals' performance on English vocabulary was in the average range. However, despite arriving to the U.S....

Code-switching is a common practice among bilinguals that seems effortless. It indicates linguistic competence in both languages, as bilinguals are able to uphold grammatical rules for this bilingual language mode while fluently switching at various loci in a sentence (Poplack, 1980). However, perception studies on code-switched speech have generally found that perceiving lexical switches incur...

Bilinguals must have a mechanism for controlling attention to their two language systems in order to achieve fluent performance in each language without intrusions from the other. This paper examines the evidence that the experience of controlling attention to two languages boosts the development of executive control processes in childhood for bilinguals, sustains cognitive control advantages f...

This paper investigates the recognition process of Japanese kanii and sentences fbr Chinese bilinguals and Native Japanese speakers <NJS), by analyzing the event-related potential (ERP) differences between the two groups while they visually recognized Japanese kanji and sentences. The results showed that no significant differences were found between the two groups while they recognized Japanese...

Speech production research has shown that Japanese monolingual speakers use mora-sized phonological units, not phoneme-sized units, when phonologically encoding Japanese words. Recent bilingual research has indicated that proficient Japanese-English bilinguals nevertheless use phoneme-sized units when phonologically encoding English words, suggesting that use of a phonological unit that is smal...

The way that bilinguals produce phones in each of their languages provides a window into the nature of the bilingual phonological space. For stop consonants, if early sequential bilinguals, whose languages differ in voice onset time (VOT) distinctions, produce native-like VOTs in each of their languages, it would imply that they have developed separate first and second language phones, that is,...