Although learning a second language (L2) as an adult is notoriously difficult, research has shown that adults can indeed attain native language-like brain processing and high proficiency levels. However, it is important to then retain what has been attained, even in the absence of continued exposure to the L2—particularly since periods of minimal or no L2 exposure are common. This event-related potential (ERP) study of an artificial language tested performance and neural processing following a substantial period of no exposure. Adults learned to speak and comprehend the artificial language to high proficiency with either explicit, classroom-like, or implicit, immersion-like training, and then underwent several months of no exposure to the language. Surprisingly, proficiency did not decrease during this delay. Instead, it remained unchanged, and there was an increase in native-like neural processing of syntax, as evidenced by several ERP changes—including earlier, more reliable, and more left-lateralized anterior negativities, and more robust P600s, in response to word-order violations. Moreover, both the explicitly and implicitly trained groups showed increased native-like ERP patterns over the delay, indicating that such changes can hold independently of L2 training type. The results demonstrate that substantial periods with no L2 exposure are not necessarily detrimental. Rather, benefits may ensue from such periods of time even when there is no L2 exposure. Interestingly, both before and after the delay the implicitly trained group showed more native-like processing than the explicitly trained group, indicating that type of training also affects the attainment of native-like processing in the brain. Overall, the findings may be largely explained by a combination of forgetting and consolidation in declarative and procedural memory, on which L2 grammar learning appears to depend. The study has a range of implications, and suggests a research program with potentially important consequences for second language acquisition and related fields.

Research with bilinguals apply different measures to assess proficiency, one of them being language background questionnaires, which include questions about individuals’ experience and self-rated proficiency. Studies suggest that bilinguals can report their proficiency consistently with objective measures (MARIAN et al., 2007; LUK et al., 2013; GERTKEN et al., 2014; BRANTMEIR et al., 2012). Within this context, the goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between two distinct measures of proficiency. In order to do so, we correlated participants’ self-rated proficiency (N = 112) in the Language Experience and Proficiency Questionnaire (QuExPLi - Questionário de Experiência e Proficiência Linguística) with their scores on the TOEFL ITP. We also carried out a simple linear regression between the mean scores of the two measures. Results show a significant weak correlation between participants’ self-rated proficiency and their scores on the TOEFL ITP, as well as a significant regression equation. Also, when the scores on individual skills were correlated with participants’ self-rated proficiency on those skills (N = 16), significant moderate to strong correlations were found. These results add to research that have found that bilinguals are able to report their proficiency accurately; however, more studies in different contexts are needed.

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Recent studies have emphasized the positive effects of early biliteracy on children’s linguistic and cognitive abilities. However, the extent to which one system affects the other is not totally understood (Finger & Brentano, in press). With that in mind, this paper presents the results of a study that aimed to compare the levels of syntactic complexity and thought organization in written production in Portuguese and in English. We predicted that both variables would correlate in the two languages, showing no negative effects of early biliteracy. Sixty children (M = 10.7) enrolled in 5th and 6th grades in a bilingual curriculum school in the metropolitan area of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, screened for proficiency, constituted the cohort of the study. The children’s home and community language is Portuguese, but they have been exposed to English at school for 10 hours a week for at least 5 years. Participants were asked to create a narrative based on a sequence of five images (Cambridge Assessment, 2018) one in English and one in Portuguese, in a counterbalanced order. The analysis of syntactic complexity involved the assessment of T-Units (Hunt, 1965) and thought organization was measured through the analysis of graph trajectories performed with the computational tool Speech Graphs (Mota et al., 2016, 2019). Preliminary results indicated a moderate positive correlation in the levels of syntactic complexity and in the attributes of thought connectivity in both languages, demonstrating that, as children advance in the development of more complex writing strategies in Portuguese, they progress in their written production in English to the same extent, confirming our initial predictions. These data reinforce the importance of teachers assessing students' written production in their two languages ​​from a bilingual perspective and from a conception that the languages ​​that make up the linguistic repertoire of the bilingual individual constitute a whole integrated system and not two independent systems that compete with each other (García, 2009).