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Cross-language studies have shown that Voice Onset Time (VOT) is a sufficient cue to separate initial stop consonants into phonemic categories. The present study used VOT as a linguistic cue in examining the perception and production of stop consonants in three groups of subjects: unilingual Canadian French, unilingual Canadian English, and bilingual French-English speakers. Perception was studied by having subjects label synthetically produced stop-vowel syllables while production was as•ssed through spectrographic measure-menCs of VOT in word-initial stops. Six stop consonants, common to both languages, were used for these tasks. On the perception task, the two groups of unilingual subjects showed different perceptual cro•sovers with those of the bilinguals occupying an intermediate position. The production data indicate that VOT measures can separate voicing contrasts for speakers of Canadian English, but not for speakers of Canadian French. The data also show that language switching in bilinguals is well controlled for production but poorly controlled for perception at the phonological level. Subject Classification: 9.7, 9.2, 9.5. to determine how individuals who have acquired two languages deal with VOT as a phonological cue. What was done experimentally, then, was to test bilingual subjects under two separate conditions; when they were set to speak and be spoken to in one language, and then

We monitored regional cerebral activity with BOLD fMRI while subjects were presented written sentences differing in their grammatical structure (subject-relative or object-relative center-embedded clauses) and their short-term memory demands (short or long antecedent-gap linkages). A core region of left posterior superior temporal cortex was recruited during all sentence conditions in comparison to a pseudofont baseline, suggesting that this area plays a central role in sustaining comprehension that is common to all sentences. Right posterior superior temporal cortex was recruited during sentences with long compared to short antecedent-gap linkages regardless of grammatical structure, suggesting that this brain region supports passive short-term memory during sentence comprehension. Recruitment of left inferior frontal cortex was most clearly associated with sentences that featured both an object-relative clause and a long antecedent-gap linkage, suggesting that this region supports the cognitive resources required to maintain long-distance syntactic dependencies during the comprehension of grammatically complex sentences.