Lexical access was examined in EnglishÁSpanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., 'Click on the beans'). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with the target (e.g., 'beetle'). Between-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in Spanish that was shared with the target ('bigote', 'mustache' in English). Participant groups varied in their age-of-acquisition of English and Spanish, and were examined in one of three language modes (Grosjean, 1998, 2001). A strong withinlanguage (English) lexical competition (or cohort effect) was modulated by language mode and age of second language acquisition. A weaker between-language (Spanish) cohort effect was influenced primarily by the age-of-acquisition of Spanish. These results highlight the role of age-ofacquisition and mode in language processing. They are discussed in comparison to previous studies addressing the role of these two variables and in terms of existing models of bilingual word recognition.

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Early development is characterized by a period of exuberant neural connectivity followed by a retraction and reweighting of connections over the course of development. It has been proposed that this connectivity may facilitate arbitrary sensory experiences in infants that are unlike anything experienced by typical adults but are similar to the sensory experiences of adults with synaesthesia, a rare sensory phenomenon that has been associated with exuberant neural connectivity and that is characterized by strong arbitrary associations between different sensations. We provide the first evidence for this infant-synaesthesia hypothesis by showing that the presence of particular shapes influences color preferences in typical 2- and 3-month-olds, but not in 8-month-olds or adults. These results are consistent with the possibility that exuberant neural connectivity facilitates synaesthetic associations during infancy that are typically eliminated during development, but that a failure of the retraction process leads in rare cases to synaesthesia in adults.

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