Current approaches to bilingualism and language learning ability obscure differences between capacity for learning (ability) and dominance (relative proficiency). Bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have persistent difficulties with complex syntax. The effects of language learning ability and relative proficiency on syntactic development in bilingual acquisition are not well described. This cross-sectional study examined the continuous effects of language ability and relative proficiency on the production of conditionals, subject/object relatives and passives in a sample of 34 five- to nine-year-old Spanish–English bilingual children, 12 of whom were identified as having DLD. Conditionals were significantly easier than other forms, and there were no differences between subject and object relatives. Higher language ability was associated with greater accuracy. Relative proficiency predicted higher English performance for balanced and English-dominant children. Further examination of language ability and relative proficiency in diverse language learners is warranted.

Language, emotion, and environment jointly shape how words are processed in real life. This study tested how valence and simulated weather influence bilingual lexical access in virtual reality (VR). Forty Spanish–English bilinguals completed a language-decision task with negative high-arousal and neutral low-arousal words under sunny and rainy conditions. Accuracy was high, with no reliable effects. Reaction times were faster for negative than for neutral words and slower under rain than sun, with no significant language effect. A Weather by Trial Order interaction reflected a practice-related speeding under sun under sunny weather. Valence and weather exerted additive influences, and weather did not modulate language or valence effects. These findings suggest that realistic perceptual load imposes general costs without altering emotional or language-related processing. The study underscores VR’s potential to integrate ecological validity into psycholinguistic paradigms, revealing how intrinsic and extrinsic factors jointly constrain bilingual emotional word processing.

The study examines the influence of bilingual experience, age and verbal working memory (WM) on the comprehension of passive voice by 116 typically developing (TD) and 65 autistic children aged 3 to 13, who were tested in their societal languages, German or French. Some children were mainly exposed to the societal language while some children were also exposed to other languages. We adopt a continuous approach to bilingual experience and operationalize it as a balance of cumulative exposure, measured through entropy scores. We found that the comprehension of passive voice improved with age in both groups, and higher verbal WM predicted better performance in autistic but not TD children. Although autistic children were less accurate than TD children, bilingual experience did not contribute to the differences between the two groups. These findings suggest that bilingualism has no detrimental effect on the comprehension of complex syntactic structures in autistic children.

The present study investigates how emotional states (positive, negative, neutral) and language-switching contexts with different switching frequencies (low: 25%, medium: 50%, high: 75%) jointly modulate executive control among unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals. By combining a language-switching task with a Flanker task within response trials, we found that compared to low- and high-switching contexts, negative states enhanced executive control in medium switching contexts by optimizing resource allocation, as reflected by reduced N2 and increased P3 effects. In high-switching contexts, positive states facilitated proactive control, with greater P3 effects in incongruent than congruent trials. However, negative states favored reactive control, with greater P3 effects in congruent than incongruent trials. We propose the Emotion Adaptive Control (EAC) model, a framework which offers a more comprehensive perspective on how bilingual language control adapts to domain-general cognitive control under emotional states.

This study evaluated English and Spanish language proficiency, and balance among these proficiencies, in relation to reading achievement in a sample of 161 middle school current and former English learners known to be struggling readers. Students were administered English and Spanish language assessments and also reported on their language usage; English reading outcomes (word reading, reading fluency, reading comprehension) were also assessed. Findings support the role of English proficiency in all three reading outcomes in this population. However, Spanish language skills, or indices that reflected the relative balance of these proficiencies, were not uniquely predictive. The present study adds nuance to the current literature and offers considerations for future work.

This study examines how emotional states interact with bilingual language control across different switching contexts. Chinese–English bilinguals performed cued and voluntary switching tasks under neutral, negative and positive emotional states. Behaviorally, negative states did not affect performance. Event-related potentials (ERPs) results revealed that in voluntary switching, negative state increased cue-locked late positive component (LPC) on switch trials, indicating greater reactive control during the late stage of language schemas competition phase. In cued switching, negative state enhanced cue- and stimulus-locked N2 and reduced stimulus-locked LPC on L1 trials, reflecting enhanced proactive control during the early stage of language schemas competition and throughout the lexical selection phase. As proactive control is more cognitively demanding than reactive control, these findings suggest that the compensatory mechanism is more strongly activated in cued switching across both language control phases. Our findings extend the adaptive control hypothesis by showing how bilinguals flexibly adjust control in emotional contexts.

It remains unclear how language and cognitive control networks interact to support second language (L2) proficiency in the bilingual brain. Our study used gradient network and dynamic causal modelling (DCM) to investigate the brain activity flow in these two brain networks underlying L2 proficiency with sixty-one Chinese-English bilinguals. We found that the gradient values of the right calcarine gyrus and the left supramarginal gyrus were positively correlated with L2 proficiency. However, multivariate pattern and region-of-interest analyses suggested that L2 proficiency may not significantly modulate the brain activity flow of these two networks in global network gradients. Meanwhile, DCM findings demonstrated that L2 proficiency development increased inhibitory effects from the language network to the cognitive control network, indicating that L2 learning would modulate the cognitive control system. In summary, our study provides further insights into how language and cognitive control networks interact to establish a smooth bilingual system underlying L2 proficiency.

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of cultural exposure conditions (i.e., Chinese culture, American culture, dual cultures and control condition) on the bilingual language switch costs during the process of language comprehension. Sixty unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals performed a modified animacy judgment task across four cultural exposure conditions, judging whether Chinese or English words referred to a living or nonliving objects. Reaction times and accuracy rates were analyzed using repeated-measures ANOVA. The results showed smaller switch costs in dual-cultural exposure than in the control condition. Furthermore, switch costs under different cultural exposures varied only for the second language (L2), with no significant differences for the first language (L1). Moreover, in the Chinese cultural exposure and control conditions, the switch costs for L2 were found to be larger than those for L1. Conversely, in the American and dual-cultural exposure conditions, the switch costs for L2 were smaller than those for L1.

We investigated how bilingual adults lexicalized novel words (bloksom) derived from existing English words (blossom), over a 24-h interval that included sleep, as a function of word-related factors (lexical frequency), task-related factors (inferencing during encoding), and individual differences in compartmentalized versus integrated bilingual use (language entropy). In Experiment 1, 48 bilingual adults explicitly learned novel word–picture pairings. In Experiment 2, 50 bilingual adults implicitly learned the same pairings. Both experiments manipulated task conditions to require an inference (Inference +) versus absence of inference (Inference −). Participant performance was responsive to word-related factors (word frequency). However, participants who use multiple languages in a low-entropy, compartmentalized manner were most responsive to explicitly tuned task factors. In contrast, participants who use their languages in a high entropy, integrated manner were most responsive to implicitly tuned task factors. These data suggest that bilingual experience modulates preferred novel word learning styles in adult bilinguals.

Examining 62 college students who are bilingual in Spanish and English, this study assessed key predictors of irregular English word spelling accuracy, including cognates and non-cognates. Explanatory item response models tested the contributions of word-level (e.g., orthographic similarity [OS] and phonemic similarity [PS] between English and Spanish word forms) and person-level predictors (e.g., literacy skills in English and Spanish) to item-level spelling accuracy. In line with prior investigations of cognate spelling in English, spelling accuracy was predicted by generally stronger English decoding skill and higher OS, with no significant influence of Spanish abilities. However, OS effects diminished after removing identical cognates from the outcome variable. An exploratory analysis revealed similar effects of English and Spanish decoding fluency on the likelihood of non-cognate spelling accuracy. These results have implications for understanding how orthographic representations of cognates are stored and accessed in the bilingual lexicon, particularly in alphabetic orthographies.

Research on the non-linguistic cognitive consequences of bilingualism remains inconclusive, with ongoing debate over which characteristics of bilinguals drive potential effects and which cognitive abilities may be involved. The impact of bilingualism and trilingualism on attentional performance was studied using a computerized Attentional Network Test. It was administered to 97 adults, assuming progressive improvement with increasing language experience. Reaction times and errors were examined across global and specific attentional network measures (alerting, orienting and executive control). Results indicated that the locus of improvement between bilinguals and trilinguals relative to monolinguals emerged primarily in global reaction times and errors, with no specific effects in any attentional network. Although differences between bilinguals and trilinguals showed only a non-significant trend, regression analyses revealed a significant logarithmic relationship whereby speaking more languages predicted faster global reaction times. The observed processing-speed improvement is discussed in relation to ongoing hypotheses proposing an adaptive response in multilinguals.

Does L2 production involve adaptive control? Previous research drawing on a parallel between Stroop effects in L1 and cognate effects in L2 produced no support for this idea when inducing adaptive control implicitly (i.e., involuntarily). Reasoning that adaptive control might be hard to implement implicitly in L2 production, here, we induced adaptive control explicitly by presenting informative cues revealing whether the upcoming stimulus would be congruent/incongruent (in L1 Stroop) or cognate/noncognate (in L2 picture naming). Adaptive control was successfully induced in L1 Stroop, with informative cues, relative to uninformative ones, having a facilitatory effect. Such was not the case for L2 picture naming, in which informative cues had an inhibitory effect. While there might be several reasons for this reverse cueing effect, this finding represents another dissociation between L2 production and conflict tasks, which likely has implications for theories assuming a close connection between domain-general and bilingualism-specific control.

Despite growing interest in prediction during simultaneous interpreting (SI), the real-time processing mechanisms supporting it remain underexplored. This study employed the visual world paradigm to investigate whether interpreters can predict upcoming content while simultaneously interpreting multi-sentence paragraphs and to examine the mechanisms underlying prediction. Interpreting students and professionals simultaneously interpreted four paragraphs embedded with sentences containing a critical verb that manipulates the predictability of the target noun, while viewing visual displays containing a target object, two semantic competitor objects and one distractor object. Both groups made predictive eye movements to the target objects before hearing the corresponding word, indicating interpreters’ ability to predict in a challenging task. The observed fixation patterns further suggest the involvement of both prediction-by-production and prediction-by-association during SI. Crucially, professionals showed more flexible attention shifts and efficient cue use, whereas students shifted attention less and used a more cautious prediction strategy.

Studies on bimodal bilingualism showed that bimodal lexical access is not costly compared to unimodal lexical access, but that it can be even advantageous. We asked whether the same can be observed in unimodal bilinguals as long as some bimodal conditions are provided. We exploited the ecological bimodal setting of subtitled videos and designed four versions of a semantic categorization task, with unimodal (spoken or written language) and bimodal (speech and captions) stimuli. Regardless of the status of the language (L1/L2) and regardless of the bimodal stimuli being also bilingual, answers to bimodal stimuli were systematically faster than speech-only stimuli and slower than written-only stimuli. These results indicate that: i) bimodal stimuli were processed differently from unimodal stimuli, ii) both modalities were taken into account simultaneously, iii) the integration between modalities occurred automatically, even if focusing on one modality only would have been advantageous.

This study investigates how personality traits modulate the foreign language effect (FLe) in moral decision-making. Meta-analyses have shown that the FLe has a small-to-moderate effect size, suggesting that individual characteristics may constrain its impact. We hypothesized that traits promoting strong deontological tendencies would moderate this effect. Our results showed that lower conscientiousness and higher emotional stability were associated with more resilient deontological responses, showing reduced susceptibility to the FLe. However, deontological choices associated with lower extraversion were overridden in a foreign language. These findings offer the first empirical evidence that broad personality traits can modulate the FLe. Moreover, our results – statistically significant but modest in magnitude – highlight key methodological considerations, including dilemma types, trait measures, and sample characteristics. Finally, they also underscore the importance of examining more fine-grained personality constructs to better understand individual variability in the extent to which foreign language use shapes moral judgment.

How much information do we need when estimating multilingual children’s relative language exposure? In the current study, we compared three different estimates at varying levels of detail: (i) global estimates per language, (ii) the average of per-speaker estimates, weighted for the time the child spends with each speaker, and (iii) estimates obtained using the Experience Sampling Method, which consisted of five surveys a day across 7 days. Data were collected from 102 multilingual children (ages 3–9 years) in the Netherlands. We found that the three exposure estimates were highly correlated and that there were only small differences in how well they correlated with children’s vocabulary knowledge. Discrepancies between estimates were largely unrelated to participant characteristics such as children’s age or the number of languages spoken at home. We conclude that the simplest estimates (i.e. global estimates) may be sufficiently reliable as a measure of multilingual children’s language exposure at home.

The shared-syntax argument of bilingual language representations has support from studies of cross-linguistic structural priming. However, more research needs to be conducted to support the grammatical co-activation hypothesis. The current study investigates the behavioral patterns of bilingual grammatical co-activation in comprehension, taking into account the age of immersion (AoI), which significantly affects the performance of bilinguals. Specifically, we tested 114 native speakers of English: 84 English–French bilinguals (53 early and 31 late learners of French) and 30 functional English monolinguals with a grammatical maze task using English stimuli manipulated with the two opposing English and French rules of adverb placement. Early bilinguals with an AoI earlier than 7 appear to be more accepting of the French adverb placement while reading English sentences. This suggests that earlier bilinguals are more likely to show co-activation (and competition) of the two languages. Results support the shared-syntax system of bilingual grammatical representations.

This study investigated the origins of mood vulnerability in heritage language (HL) grammar. Prior research on adult heritage speakers (HSs) shows that subjunctive use with sentential complements is highly vulnerable, hypothesized to stem from language-internal (type of selection, modality) and language-external (HL experience) factors. We examined Spanish subjunctive use in complements to factive emotive predicates (Presupposition) and nonassertive predicates (Nonassertion), where mood selection is pragmatically conditioned. We also tested two categorical contexts (Volition, Control indicative). Data from 78 school-age HSs indicated that reduced subjunctive use in sentential complements derived from children with insufficient exposure to and capacity with the HL to master the categorical, modally simple volition context. Most of the child HSs relied on nonsubjunctive felicitous and infelicitous responses as alternative or innovative ways of expressing modal meanings in these contexts. We propose that bilingual children in central Texas may be developing a distinct HL grammar for modality.