Whether words are or are not activated within the lexicon of the nonused language is an important question for accounts of bilingual word production. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results, either because alternative accounts could be proposed for their findings or because activation could have been artificially induced by the…

For bilinguals born in an English-speaking country or who arrive at a young age, English (L2) often becomes their dominant language by adulthood. This study examines whether such adult bilinguals show equivalent performance to monolingual English native speakers on three English auditory processing tasks: phonemic awareness, spelling-to-dictation…

There is little agreement on the mechanisms involved in second language (L2) processing of regular and irregular inflectional morphology and on the exact role of age, amount, and type of exposure to L2 resulting in differences in L2 input and use. The article contributes to the ongoing debates by reporting the results of two experiments on Russian…

This article presents new evidence from offline and online processing of garden-path sentences that are ambiguous between reduced relative clause resolution and main verb resolution. The participants of this study are intermediate and advanced German learners of English who have learned the language in a nonimmersed context. The results show that…

Infants in the early stages of word learning have difficulty learning lexical neighbors (i.e. word pairs that differ by a single phoneme), despite their ability to discriminate the same contrast in a purely auditory task. While prior work has focused on top-down explanations for this failure (e.g. task demands, lexical competition), none has…

This review brings together evidence from a diverse field of methods for investigating sex differences in language processing. Differences are found in certain language-related deficits, such as stuttering, dyslexia, autism and schizophrenia. Common to these is that language problems may follow from, rather than cause the deficit. Large studies…

We use syntactic priming to test the abstractness of the sentence representations of young 3-year-olds (35-42 months). In describing pictures with inanimate participants, 18 children primed with passives produced more passives (11 with a strict scoring scheme, 16 with lax scoring) than did 18 children primed with actives (2 on either scheme) or 12…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed the "sequence encoder" is used to learn…

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is "structural priming," a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced…

Functional imaging studies of single word production have consistently reported activation of the lateral prefrontal and cingulate cortex. Its contribution has been shown to be sensitive to task demands, which can be manipulated by the degree of response specification. Compared with classical verbal fluency, free word association relies less on…

Many offline studies on third language acquisition suggest strong connections between speakers' L3 and L2 rather than between their L3 and L1, especially if the foreign languages are typologically related (Cenoz, Hufeisen, & Jessner, 2001; Singleton, 2001). However, a recent online study investigating trilingual processing did not provide evidence…

This study explores the effects that the age of onset (AO) of second language (L2) acquisition exerts on the attrition of first language (L1) event conceptualization patterns. The subjects studied are L1 Spanish-L2 Swedish bilinguals living in Sweden. The specific research questions addressed in the study concern the role of AO in endpoint…

Studies on bilingualism from a neurocognitive perspective have begun to attract considerable interest recently. Contextual variables--such as age of acquisition, level of proficiency and frequency of use--have been identified as significantly impacting on the convergence or divergence of representations in first language (L1) and second (L2)…

The article by Carota and Sirigu addresses a fundamental issue, namely the domain specificity of people's ability to learn and implement sequential structures of events. The authors review theoretical positions and empirical findings related to this issue, providing a useful summary of representative models of sequential event structures, and a…