Cognitive Factors In Bilingual Language Processing

This collection of 33 papers represents the most current thinking and research on the study of cognitive processing in bilingual individuals. The contributors include well-known figures in the field and promising new scholars, representing four continents and work in dozens of languages. Instead of the social, political, or educational implications of bilingualism, the focus is on how bilingual people (mostly adults) think and process language.

A collection of papers that explore bilingual children coping with two language systems.

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage in this volume is a testament to the many different aspects of bilingualism that continue to generate phenomenal interest in the scholarly community. The bilingual experience is captured through a multifaceted prism that includes aspects of language and literacy development in child bilinguals with and without developmental language disorders, language processing and mental representations in adult bilinguals across the lifespan, and the cognitive and neurological basis of bilingualism. Different theoretical approaches – from generative UG-based models to constructivist usage-based models – are brought to bear on the nature of bilingual linguistic knowledge. The end result is a compendium of the state-of-the-art of a field that is in constant evolution and that is on an upward trajectory of discovery.

Research on bilingual language processing reveals an important role for control processes that enable bilinguals to negotiate the potential competition across their two languages. The requirement for control that enables bilinguals to speak the intended language and to switch between languages has also been suggested to confer a set of cognitive consequences for executive function that extend beyond language to domain general cognitive skills. Many recent studies have examined aspects of how cognitive control is manifest during bilingual language processing, how individual differences in cognitive resources influence second language learning and performance, and the range of cognitive tasks that appear to be influenced by bilingualism. However, not all studies demonstrate a bilingual advantage in all tasks that tap into cognitive control. Indeed, many questions are unanswered that are critical to our understanding of bilingual control: What aspects of cognitive control are enhanced for proficient bilinguals? How are individual differences in cognitive control related to language acquisition, proficiency, or professional translation skill? How does the language environment affect concurrent processing? How exactly does language control come about in tasks such as speech production, switching between languages, or translation? When and how does inhibitory processing support language control? The focus of this Research Topic is on executive control and bilingualism. The goal is to have a broad scope that includes all of these issues. We seek empirical contributions using different methodologies including behavioral, computational and neuroscience approaches. We also welcome theoretical contributions that provide detailed discussion of models or mechanisms that account for the relationship between bilingualism and cognitive control. We aim to provide a platform for new contributions that represent a state-of-the art overview of approaches to cognitive control in bilingualism. We hope that this Research Topic will enable the field to formulate more precise hypotheses and causal models on the relation between individual differences, cognitive control and bilingual language processing.

The study of bilingualism has charted a dramatically new, important, and exciting course in the 21st century, benefiting from the integration in cognitive science of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology (especially work on the higher-level cognitive processes often called executive function or executive control). Current research, as exemplified in this book, advances the study of the effects of bilingualism on executive function by identifying many different ways of being bilingual, exploring the multiple facets of executive function, and developing and analyzing tasks that measure executive function. The papers in this volume (21 chapters), by leading researchers in bilingualism and cognition, investigate the mechanisms underlying the effects (or lack thereof) of bilingualism on cognition in children, adults, and the elderly. They take us beyond the standard, classical, black-and-white approach to the interplay between bilingualism and cognition by presenting new methods, new findings, and new interpretations.

The Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism presents a comprehensive introduction to the foundations of bilingualism, covering language processing, language acquisition, cognition and the bilingual brain. This thorough introduction to the psycholinguistics of bilingualism is accessible to non-specialists with little previous exposure to the field Introduces students to the methodological approaches currently employed in the field, including observation, experimentation, verbal and computational modelling, and brain imaging Examines spoken and written language processing, simultaneous and successive language acquisition, bilingual memory and cognitive effects, and neurolinguistic and neuro-computational models of the bilingual brain Written in an accessible style by two of the field’s leading researchers, together with contributions from internationally-renowned scholars Featuring chapter-by-chapter research questions, this is an essential resource for those seeking insights into the bilingual mind and our current knowledge of the cognitive basis of bilingualism

There is ample evidence that language users, including second-language (L2) users, can predict upcoming information during listening and reading. Yet it is still unclear when, how, and why language users engage in prediction, and what the relation is between prediction and learning. This volume presents a collection of current research, insights, and directions regarding the role of prediction in L2 processing and learning. The contributions in this volume specifically address how different (L1-based) theoretical models of prediction apply to or may be expanded to account for L2 processing, report new insights on factors (linguistic, cognitive, social) that modulate L2 users’ engagement in prediction, and discuss the functions that prediction may or may not serve in L2 processing and learning. Taken together, this volume illustrates various fruitful approaches to investigating and accounting for differences in predictive processing within and across individuals, as well as across populations.