Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.

This study argues that a productive but not fully regular morphological phenomenon, the choice of linking morphemes in Dutch nominal compounds, is based on analogy. In Dutch, a linking -s-or -en-can appear between the constituents of a nominal compound. We present production experiments that reveal strong evidence that the choice of linking morphemes in novel compounds is analogically determined by the distribution of linking morphemes in what we call the ''constituent families.'' A ''constituent family'' is the set of existing compounds that share the first (or second) constituent with the novel compound. A further experiment shows that in the case of derived pseudo-words as first constituents, it is the family of the suffix that influences the choice of the following linking morpheme. In addition to these experiments, we present computational simulation studies in which the choices made by participants in our experiments are predicted with a high degree of accuracy using a machine-learning algorithm for analogy. These studies support the status of the constituent family as the primary basis for analogical prediction. Finally, we outline a psycholinguistic model for analogy in the mental lexicon that does not give up symbolic representations and, at the same time, captures nondeterministic variation.

A growing body of research shows that the brain adapts functionally and structurally to specific bilingual experiences. These brain adaptations seem related to modulations in cognitive processes (specifically the executive functions). However, the trajectory of these adaptations is varied and seems at least partially dependent on different aspects of language exposure and use. Here we provide a review of the existing theoretical models covering bilingualism-induced neuroplasticity. Moreover, we propose a unifying framework (Unifying the Bilingual Experience Trajectories, UBET) to more comprehensively map the relationship between the various neurocognitive adaptations and different aspects of bilingual experience trajectories, focusing on intensity and diversity of language use, language switching, relative proficiency, and duration of bilingual experience. Crucially, we also outline predictions regarding both relationships between different bilingual experience factors and relationships between the measurable neurocognitive adaptations. Our framework offers a theoretical backdrop and clear testable predictions for future largescale empirical studies on individual differences in bilingual trajectories and their effects on neurocognitive adaptations.

A B S T R A C TThe family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, has been shown to affect adults' access to compound words in the mental lexicon. The present study was designed to see if family size would affect children's segmentation of compounds. Twenty-five English-speaking children between 3;7 and 5; 9 were asked to explain the meaning of existing compounds with constituents of varying family size to an alien puppet. The results showed that children were more likely to mention the modifier of compounds if they came from large constituent families than if they came from small constituent families. Other variables were also shown to have some, but smaller effects on children's parsing, including the frequency of the constituent words and the compounds, whether the compounds were already known, and age. These results suggest that children's segmentation of compounds might be facilitated by analogy with other compounds already in their vocabularies.

Bilingualism and its cognitive impacts have drawn increasing interest. Recently, inconsistencies in the findings have raised discussions on what might have caused such discrepancies and how evidence should be evaluated. This review tries to shed new light onto the reasons for the inconsistencies by taking a novel perspective. Motivated by the finding that bilingualism affects response time distribution profiles, particularly findings that suggest bilinguals have fewer long responses, we investigated the relation between maximum response times allowed/included in the analysis of an experiment and the finding of a bilingual advantage. We reviewed 68 experiments from 33 articles that compared monolingual and bilingual speakers' performance in three commonly used non-verbal interference tasks (Simon, Spatial Stroop and Flanker). We found that studies that included longer responses in their analysis were more likely to report a bilingualism effect. We conclude that seemingly insignificant details such as the data trimming procedure can have a potential impact on whether an effect is observed. We also discuss the implication of our findings and suggest the usefulness of more fine-grid analytical procedures.

Bilinguals have been found to possess cognitive advantages. But the nature of this advantage is unclear. While some evidence suggests that bilinguals have developed enhanced inhibitory control abilities, other evidence suggests that they possess enhanced attentional control abilities. In the current study, English monolingual and English–Chinese bilingual young adults were tested in three non-verbal conflict tasks (Flanker task, Spatial Stroop task and Simon task). Ex-Gaussian analyses were utilized to inspect response time distributions. The two participant groups showed comparable effects of stimulus-response congruency on the Gaussian part of response distributions (μ), but different effects on the distribution tails (τ), with reduced tails for bilingual speakers particularly in the more demanding incongruent condition. These results suggest that bilingual advantage emerges from better sustained attention and attentional monitoring rather than inhibition. We also discuss the usefulness of ex-Gaussian analyses.

A number of electroencephalography (EEG) studies have investigated the time course of brain activation during overt word production. The interpretation of their results is complicated by the fact that articulatory movements may mask the cognitive components of interest. The first aim of the present study was to investigate when speech artifacts occur during word production planning and what effects they have on the spatio-temporal neural activation pattern. The second aim was to propose a new method that strongly attenuates speech artifacts during overt picture naming and to compare it with existing methods. EEG and surface electromyograms (EMGs) of the lips were recorded while participants overtly named pictures in a picture-word interference paradigm. The comparison of the raw data with lip EMG and the comparison of source localizations of raw and corrected EEG data showed that speech artifacts occurred mainly from ~400 ms post-stimulus onset, but some earlier artifacts mean that they occur much earlier than hitherto assumed. We compared previously used methods of speech artifacts removal (SAR) with a new method, which is based on Independent Component Analysis (SAR-ICA). Our new method clearly outperformed other methods. In contrast to other methods, there was only a weak correlation between the lip EMG and the corrected data by SAR-ICA. Also, only the data corrected with our method showed activation of cerebral sources consistent with meta-analyses of word production.

The debate on possible cognitive advantages bilinguals have over monolinguals continues to occupy the research community. There is an ever-growing research body focusing on adjudicating whether there is, in fact, an effect of using two or more languages regularly on cognition. In this paper, we briefly review some of the more pertinent literature that has attempted to identify attenuating, modulating, and confounding factors in research comparing monolingual and bilingual populations, and we highlight issues that should be taken into account in future research to move forward as a research community. At the same time, we argue for a change in perspective concerning what is deemed an advantage and what is not and argue for more ecologically valid research that investigates real-life advantages.