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The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the performance of highly proficient bilinguals in language-switching contexts involving (a) the 2nd language (L2) and the L3 of the bilinguals, (b) the L3 and the L4, and (c) the L1 and a recently learned new language. Highly proficient bilinguals showed symmetrical switching costs regardless of the age at which the L2 was learned and of the similarities of the 2 languages and asymmetrical switching costs when 1 of the languages involved in the switching task was very weak (an L4 or a recently learned language). The theoretical implications of these results for the attentional mechanisms used by highly proficient bilinguals to control their lexicalization process are discussed.

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Linguistic analysis claims that verb agreement is composed of distinct phi-features such as person and number, but are these different phi-features processed distinctly or similarly? We used a sentence grammaticality task to explore the electrophysiological responses of Basque speakers when processing subject–verb person and number phi-feature agreement violations. We generated grammatical structures (grammatical control) and ungrammatical structures in which the verb disagreed with the subject in person (person violation), in number (number violation), or in both person and number features (person+number violation). Behavioral data revealed that, overall, participants were faster and more accurate detecting person and person+number violations than violations involving only number. Event-related potential responses revealed a N400–P600 pattern for all violation types. Person and person+number violations elicited larger P600 effects than number violations. These findings reveal different costs related to the processing of person and number phi-feature agreement and indicate that these features are distinct components of agreement computation.