The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese–English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners (the vs. that/these) to see how determiner-specification influences both native and nonnative processing downstream for verbal number ...

Long-term management of more than one language has been argued to contribute to changes in brain and cognition. This has been particularly well documented in older age, where bilingualism has been linked to protective effects against neurocognitive decline. Since memory difficulties are key aspects of this decline, herein we examine potential effects of bilingualism on the hippocampus, a brain ...

The present article examines the proposal that typology is a major factor guiding transfer selectivity in L3/L<i>n</i> acquisition. We tested first exposure in L3/L<i>n</i> using two artificial languages (ALs) lexically based in English and Spanish, focusing on gender agreement between determiners and nouns, and between nouns and adjectives. 50 L1 Spanish-L2 English speakers took part in the experiment. ...

Spanish captures the difference between eventive and stative passives via an obligatory choice between two copula; verbal passives take the copula ser and adjectival passives take the copula estar. In this study, we compare and contrast US and Canadian heritage speakers of Spanish on their knowledge of this difference in relation to copula choice in Spanish. The backgrounds of the target groups ...

We used event-related potentials to investigate how markedness impacts person agreement in English-speaking learners of L2-Spanish. Markedness was examined by probing agreement with both first-person (marked) and third-person (unmarked) subjects. Agreement was manipulated by crossing first-person subjects with third-person verbs and vice-versa. Native speakers showed a P600 for both errors, larger ...

Research on multilingual lexical organization is coming to a consensus, led by a growing body of studies (e.g., De Groot, Delmaar & Lupker, 2000; Dijkstra, Grainger & Van Heuven, 1999; Kroll & Stewart, 1994; Van Heuven, Schriefers, Dijkstra & Hagoort, 2008), whereby the multilingual lexicon is seen as a unitary system and cross-linguistic competition occurs during lexical access. This increasing ...

The goal of this chapter is to lay out the central themes of heritage language acquisition research adopting a formal/theoretical linguistic perspective. Specifically, we aim to provide a detailed discussion of the nature of heritage language grammars. In doing so, we will address the debates on how to explain heritage speaker competence differences from monolingual baselines and more. This ...

Agreement attraction, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g., <i>*The key to the cabinets were rusty</i>), has been influential in motivating models of memory access during language comprehension. It is contested, however, whether such effects arise due to a faulty representation of relevant morphosyntactic features, or as a result of memory retrieval. Existing studies of ...

Evidence from various empirical study types have converged to show bilingualism's potential for serving as a cognitive and brain reserves contributor. In this article, I contextualize, frame the need for and offer some expanding questions in this endeavor, inclusive of empirical pathways to address them. While the set of variables and questions discussed herein are definitively incomplete, they ...

Bilingualism has been shown to contribute to increased resilience against cognitive aging. One of the key brain structures linked to memory and dementia symptom onset, the hippocampus, has been observed to adapt in response to bilingual experience – at least in healthy individuals. However, in the context of neurodegenerative pathology, it is yet unclear what role previous bilingual experience ...