Many bilinguals speak both languages proficiently and habitually; however, the contexts in which the languages are used can vary. The present study examined the effects of context variation on emotions, comparing a national language used everywhere to a regional language spoken only among family and friends. We found a higher sensitivity to disgust (Experiment 1), a greater enjoyment of humor (Experiment 2) and stronger emotions in response to endearments, reprimands and insults (Experiment 3) with the regional language. The regional language induced stronger emotional responses, even though it was used less frequently than the national language. The effects of the regional language varied depending on the frequency of its use. We propose that these effects on emotions reflect the different opportunities to use the language among family and friends, contexts critical for the acquisition and regulation of emotions and in which emotions are expressed quite vividly.

Grammatical aspect is a linguistic correlate of the temporal distribution of an event. However, aspect is not identical across languages. Crosslinguistic differences in mapping between aspect and basic temporal features such as event stage can reveal underlying language-specific criteria that guide event conceptualization. We investigated the relationship between grammatical aspect and event stage in conceptualizations of in-progress and completed events by native (L1) and non-native (L2) speakers of aspectual languages Russian and English. In L1, event stage predicted aspect in Russian but not in English. In L2s, event stage did not predict aspect. We discuss these findings in terms of crosslinguistic differences in the relevance of event stage for conceptualization in L1 as well as the role of L1 transfer in L2 aspect use.

Bilingualism delays the onset of dementia symptoms and contributes to cognitive reserve. However, the neural basis of this mechanism remains elusive. The few studies that have investigated neural mechanisms of cognitive reserve and bilingualism have focused on Alzheimer’s disease. This study investigated the neural basis of cognitive reserve among persons with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) using regional brain volumes. Sixty-eight persons with FTD (42 bilinguals and 26 monolinguals) were included. After propensity score matching for age, sex, education, FTD subtype and clinical severity, there were 26 bilinguals and 26 monolinguals. The results showed that bilinguals had reduced thalamic volume compared to monolinguals despite having similar cognitive performance. The results indicate that bilinguals were able to tolerate more severe atrophy compared to monolinguals while maintaining comparable cognitive abilities. Our study therefore suggests that bilingualism contributes to cognitive reserve in persons with FTD.

Changes in narrative skills among Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) were examined following Bilingual Narrative Intervention. Eight children with DLD and nine typically developing children participated in two six-session intervention blocks, first in the home language HL/Russian and then in the societal language SL/Hebrew. Intervention sessions involved retelling single-episode stories accompanied by icons/gestures, repetition, and peer interaction. Narrative skills were assessed at four-time points. Results showed that while typically developing children performed better overall, both groups followed similar trajectories. Children performed better in HL/Russian across all assessments. Macrostructure improved in both groups after HL/Russian intervention, particularly for “Feeling” and “Goal” elements. Bilingual typical language development children showed higher lexical diversity, with significant improvement following HL/Russian intervention. Children with bilingual DLD made more errors in HL/Russian, but similar error rates emerged between groups for SL/Hebrew. Earlier age of onset of bilingualism correlated with better macrostructure in SL/Hebrew but not in HL/Russian. Findings underscore the need for tailored intervention in both languages which considers clinical status and bilingual children’s background.

We conducted a detailed linguistic analysis of Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) from older Spanish-English bilinguals (n = 28) to determine which cognitive, linguistic, and demographic factors predict proficiency. In the dominant language, older age was associated with lower proficiency scores, but aging effects were not significant after accounting for cognitive functioning scores. In the nondominant language, bilinguals with larger vocabulary scores, fewer speech errors, and higher education levels obtained higher proficiency scores. Multiple linguistic submeasures from the OPIs were highly correlated across languages (e.g., fast speakers spoke fast in both languages), but these same measures exhibited significant language dominance effects (e.g., bilinguals spoke faster in the dominant than in the nondominant language). These results suggest it is critical to control for cognitive functioning when examining aging effects on language production, reveal powerful individual differences that affect how people talk regardless of language, and validate the use of the OPI to measure bilingual proficiency.

This study explores lexical borrowing and loanword nativization from a neuro-cognitive perspective testing bi-dialectal speakers of Standard Chinese and Shanghainese Chinese. We created holistic and morpheme-based cross-dialectal loanwords for auditory sentence processing and compared them with Shanghainese-specific words, code-switches, and pre-existing etymologically related words. Participants rated their acceptance of each word, indicating Shanghainese-specific lexical nativeness. GAM analysis of EEG signals revealed that reduced acceptance correlated with frontal positive shifts in ERPs. Holistic loanwords triggered P300-like shifts associated with form-mismatch, whereas morpheme-based loanwords produced LPC-like shifts, suggesting sentence-level re-analysis, and N400-like early frontal negative shifts, indicating lexical integration challenges. Our results indicate that both lexical acceptance and adaptation strategies are pivotal in the cognitive integration of loanwords, revealing distinct neuropsychological stages and pathways in loanword nativization.

This study revisits the V3 linearization AdvP>Subject>finite verb in Kiezdeutsch, comparing it to resumptive verb-third Left Dislocation and Hanging Topic Left Dislocation. Using corpus data, preverbal object DPs are shown to almost never occur across verb-third distributions, yet preverbal nominative subjects and spatio-temporal elements are unproblematic. This behavior is argued to involve a low C-domain position encoding a Subject of Predication requirement (see Cardinaletti 2004) tied to aboutness and nominative Case-assigning features, but not a strict D-related subject EPP. Based on comparison with other corpora and analysis of metadata, speakers from non-German-speaking homes, namely successive bilinguals, are argued to have innovated this property. A novel account is suggested for the emergence of V3 based on claims that it results from a natural informational order (Wiese et al. 2020), which is formalized as a Minimal Default Grammar (Roeper 1999) available to children before they fully acquire CP and TP. Children acquiring a V2 language must either reject V3 or incorporate it into a V2 syntax. Lacking adequate counterevidence in their input, Kiezdeutsch speakers do the latter.*

Risk aversion—the preference for certainty over potential gains or losses—is reduced when using a foreign language. We investigated 2 mechanisms for this foreign language effect using incentivized gambles with verbal probability expressions: (1) that people perceive prospects of winning as larger when a decision is made in their foreign language; (2) that people experience reduced negative affect toward risk in a foreign language. In Experiment 1, N = 229 proficient Polish–English bilinguals, using ungridded slider, assigned numerical values to 29 verbal probability expressions in both languages. We found small bidirectional differences in 13 of them, leading us to reject the first mechanism. In Experiment 2, N = 281 participants gambled in incentivized neutral expected value lotteries using a sample of the verbal probability expressions from Experiment 1. Participants gambled in either their native or foreign language, where participants could either accept around 50% of gambles (debiased to risk-neutral) or more than 50% (biased to risk-seeking). Surprisingly, we observed no significant risk aversion in either language condition, with participants’ gambling behavior close to 50% in both cases. The finding that participants showed no risk aversion in native language condition meant we could not test whether foreign language reduces risk aversion. However, this result did show that using a foreign language does not promote excessive risk-taking. Our findings suggest that using verbal probability expressions does not bias participants’ responses, and may inherently reduce risk aversion.

We use data on Latino children in the United States who have been randomly assigned calculation tests in English or Spanish to check for the so-called bilingual advantage, the notion that knowing more than one language improves individuals’ other cognitive skills. After controlling for different characteristics of children and their parents, as well as children's time in the US, we find a bilingual advantage among children who read or write in English and Spanish but not for those who only speak or understand both languages. In particular, bilingual readers or writers perform one-fourth to one-third of a standard deviation better than monolingual children, equal to learning gains of an additional school year. Applying the Oster test, we find that selection on unobservables would need to be 3–4 times stronger than selection on observables to explain away our results. The bilingual advantage is stronger among children in two-parent households with siblings and for those at the upper end of the ability distribution.

The ability to understand and speak more than one language (i.e., bilingualism) may provide benefits to preserving social cognition against normal age-related deteriorations. This study examined how variations in bilingual language experience influence theory-of-mind (ToM) understanding in late adulthood. One hundred and five cognitively healthy older adults (Mage = 66.23 years, range = 56–79) and 80 young adults (Mage = 22.03 years, range = 19–30), who were bilingual speakers, completed a ToM task battery, a self-report questionnaire on their language background, and a battery of general cognition assessments. We found an overall age-related decline in ToM, where older adults made more errors in inferring others’ mental states compared with young adults. Importantly, an earlier L2 age of acquisition (L2AoA) predicted better ToM performance among older adults, over and above the effects of age, education, and general cognition. The results suggest that early bilingual acquisition may enhance social cognitive processes during development and contribute to intact ToM abilities in older adult bilinguals.

Collocations, defined as sequences of frequently co-occurring words, show a processing advantage over novel word combinations in both L1 and L2 speakers. This collocation advantage is mainly observed for canonical configurations (e.g., provide information), but collocations can also occur in variation configurations (e.g., provide some of the information). Variation collocations still show a processing advantage in L1 speakers, but generally not in L2 speakers. The present eye-tracking-while-reading experiment investigated word order variation by passivising collocations (e.g., information was provided) in L1 and advanced L2 speakers of English. Altering word order did not eliminate the collocation advantage in either L1 or L2 speakers. The collocation effect was independent of contextual predictability and modulated by L2 proficiency. Results support the view that collocations are stored and retrieved via semantic representation rather than as holistic form chunks and that collocation processing does not qualitatively differ between L1 and advanced L2 speakers.

Bilingual speakers are prompted to remain in a single language, switch between languages, or codeswitch by regulating the concurrent activation of their language systems and adapting to the demands of the communicative context. Unlike studies that compare language switching in bilinguals in distinct interactional and geographical contexts, this study investigates heritage bilinguals who may be required to manage their home and societal languages differently within the course of a day. We examined how this variation affects linguistic and cognitive factors in spoken production. Critically, picture naming in Spanish and English appeared to rely on different mechanisms of cognitive control: greater reliance on proactive control led to decreased performance in Spanish picture naming but increased performance in English. Although convergent with findings that L2-immersed bilinguals prefer proactive control strategies, the findings with heritage bilinguals suggest that recruitment of cognitive control during speech planning is more dynamic than has been previously reported.

This paper examined the interaction between narrative performance, language exposure, and standardized measures of morphosyntax and semantics, in bilingual children tested two times, 1 year apart. We aimed to 1) identify the factor structure of oral narrative measures, and 2) examine the direction and strength of the effects of (i) language exposure and (ii) the relationship between language domains and narrative production. A total of 143 Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilingual children completed a battery of oral narrative and oral language proficiency assessments in Spanish and English at two time points (kindergarten and Grade 1). Factor analyses yielded an identical two-factor structure of bilingual oral narrative measurements, namely productivity (word production) and complexity (sentence structure), in both Spanish and English across the two time points. Cross-lagged analysis showed that narrative production predicted semantics and morphosyntax performance in Spanish and English one year later. Cross-language transfer from L1 to L2 on the complexity of narrative was noted. Language exposure predicted only Spanish narrative production, but not English. These results suggest within- and cross-language transfer, highlighting the importance of L1 language development. In addition, current findings highlight the importance of language exposure for L1 in early school-age children.

This study examined the linguistic and cognitive characteristics of two groups of Italian preschoolers with developmental language disorder (DLD): one group of monolingual Italian speakers and another of Italian-Slovenian bilinguals. The assessment focused on executive functions (EFs) (i.e., phonological working memory and inhibitory control) and linguistic abilities, which involved a multilevel analysis of discourse production. The bilingual group outperformed the monolingual group on tasks measuring EFs. While the two groups showed similar performance across several linguistic measures, the bilingual children demonstrated superior grammatical comprehension, albeit with high variability. A similar level of variability was observed in the bilingual group’s phonological discrimination abilities. Both grammatical comprehension and phonological discrimination were significantly correlated with EFs. These findings are discussed in the context of current theories of linguistic development in bilingual children with DLD.

Effects of language switching in bilinguals have been extensively investigated, but the majority of studies have focused on switching in language production. Here we explored intrasentential switching between Chinese and English, employing a self-paced reading paradigm, with Chinese/English using radically different orthographic systems. In addition, we investigated whether L2 (English) proficiency influences switch costs. Results revealed that switch costs emerged only when switching into L1 (Chinese); by contrast, when switching into L2, a less reliable facilitatory effect was observed. L2 proficiency affected reading speed for English stimuli, but it did not directly modulate switch costs. Moreover, we have integrated various findings from previous research and identified that the use of different comparison patterns is a major contributing factor to the inconsistency in results among prior studies. We suggest that in cross-script language switching, switch costs stem from a general cognitive control mechanism rather than from activation within the bilingual mental lexicon.

In contrast to ample evidence for cross-linguistic priming of monomorphemic words, cross-linguistic representation of affixes is not well understood. The current study examines cross-linguistic prefix priming among early and late English-Spanish bilinguals, focusing on prefixes that have the same form and meaning in the two languages. We first confirm robust prefix priming among English monolingual speakers (Experiment 1). We also observe prefix priming from first-language English to second-language Spanish but only for early bilinguals (Experiment 2). On the other hand, both early and late bilinguals do not show reliable prefix priming effects that are dissociated from orthographic or semantic priming from Spanish to English (Experiment 3) or from Spanish to Spanish (Experiment 4). The results suggest that for early bilinguals, the tested prefixes in their L1 and L2 have shared representations. Less reliable results for late bilinguals may reflect their weaker sensitivity to morphological structure in a second language.

We explored whether bilingual toddlers make use of semantic and phonological overlap between their languages to learn new words. We analysed cross-sectional and longitudinal CDI data on the words understood and produced by 1.0 to 3.0-year-old bilingual toddlers with English and one additional language. Cognates were more likely to be understood and produced compared to non-cognates. Cognate effects were modulated by whether the toddler knew the translation equivalent in the other language, highlighting that young learners are sensitive to the similarities across their languages. Additionally, exploratory analyses suggest that children with smaller vocabularies rely more on translation equivalents to support the acquisition of difficult words. Children with larger vocabulary sizes exhibited no preference for translation equivalents in comprehension, and a preference for new concepts in production. The rapid acceleration of vocabulary growth in the second year of life may explain this developmental change in translation equivalent preference.

This study examined the influence of letter transpositions on morphological facilitation in L1 English and L1 Chinese-L2 English speakers. Morphological priming effects were investigated by comparing morphologically complex primes that either contained transposed-letters (TL) within the stem or across the morpheme boundary, relative to a substituted-letter (SL) control. Within two masked primed lexical decision experiments, the same stem targets were preceded by morphologically related, TL-within, SL-within, TL-across, SL-across, or unrelated primes. Reaction time analyses with morphologically intact primes revealed facilitation in both L1 and L2 English. In L1, TL-within priming was significant, while the magnitude of TL-across priming varied as a function of positional specific bigram frequency and spelling proficiency. In L2, TL-priming was entirely absent. These findings support models of complex word recognition that accommodate relative flexibility in letter position encoding.