We explored whether a bilingual advantage in executive control is associated with differences in cultural and ethnic background associated with the bilinguals' immigrant status, and whether dialect use in monolinguals can also incur such an advantage. Performance on the Simon task in older non-immigrant (Gaelic-English) and immigrant (Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Malay, Punjabi, Urdu-English) bilinguals was compared with three groups of older monolingual English speakers, who were either monodialectal users of the same English variety as the bilinguals or were bidialectal users of a local variety of Scots. Results showed no group differences in overall reaction times as well as in the Simon effect thus providing no evidence that an executive control advantage is related to differences in cultural and ethnic background as was found for immigrant compared to non-immigrant bilinguals, nor that executive control may be improved by use of dialect. We suggest the role of interactional contexts and bilingual literacy as potential explanations for inconsistent findings of a bilingual advantage in executive control.

This study investigated the acquisition of overt morphological case by adult native speakers of English who were learning Russian or German as a second language (L2). The Russian casemarking system is more complex than the German system; but it almost always provides the listener with case inflections that are reliable cues to sentence interpretation. Two approaches to learning of inflectional morphology were contrasted: the rule-based approach which predicts that learning is determined by paradigm complexity and the associative approach which predicts that learning is determined by the cue validity of individual inflections. A computerized picture-choice task probed the comprehension of L2 learners by varying the cues case-marking, noun configuration, and noun animacy. The results demonstrated that learners of Russian use casemarking much earlier than learners of German and that learners of German rely more on animacy to supplement the weaker case-marking cue. In order to further explore the underlying mechanisms of learning, a connectionist model was developed which correctly simulated the obtained results. Together, these findings support the view that adult L2 learning is associative and driven by the validity of cues in the input.

We introduce two experiments that explored syntactic and semantic processing of spoken sentences by native and non-native speakers. In the first experiment, the neural substrates corresponding to detection of syntactic and semantic violations were determined in native speakers of two typologically different languages using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results show that the underlying neural response of participants to stimuli across different native languages is quite similar. In the second experiment, we investigated how non-native speakers of a language process the same stimuli presented in the first experiment. First, the results show a more similar pattern of increased activation between native and non-native speakers in response to semantic violations than to syntactic violations. Second, the non-native speakers were observed to employ specific portions of the frontotemporal language network differently from those employed by native speakers. These regions included the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), and subcortical structures of the basal ganglia.

Bilinguals rely on cognitive control mechanisms like selective activation and inhibition of lexical entries to prevent intrusions from the non-target language. We present cross-linguistic evidence that these mechanisms also operate in bidialectals. Thirty-two native German speakers who sometimes use the Öcher Platt dialect, and thirty-two native English speakers who sometimes use the Dundonian Scots dialect completed a dialect-switching task. Naming latencies were higher for switch than for non-switch trials, and lower for cognate compared to non-cognate nouns. Switch costs were symmetrical, regardless of whether participants actively used the dialect or not. In contrast, sixteen monodialectal English speakers, who performed the dialect-switching task after being trained on the Dundonian words, showed asymmetrical switch costs with longer latencies when switching back into Standard English. These results are reminiscent of findings for balanced vs. unbalanced bilinguals, and suggest that monolingual dialect speakers can recruit control mechanisms in similar ways as bilinguals.

In this study, we sought to identify cognitive predictors of individual differences in adult foreign-language learning and to test whether metalinguistic awareness mediated the observed relationships. Using a miniature language-learning paradigm, adults (N = 77) learned Russian vocabulary and grammar (gender agreement and case marking) over six 1-h sessions, completing tasks that encouraged attention to phrases without explicitly teaching grammatical rules. The participants' ability to describe the Russian gender and case-marking patterns mediated the effects of nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning on grammar learning and generalization. Hence, even under implicit-learning conditions, individual differences stemmed from explicit metalinguistic awareness of the underlying grammar, which, in turn, was linked to nonverbal intelligence and auditory sequence learning. Prior knowledge of languages with grammatical gender (predominantly Spanish) predicted learning of gender agreement. Transfer of knowledge of gender from other languages to Russian was not mediated by awareness, which suggests that transfer operates through an implicit process akin to structural priming.

To examine effects of input and learner characteristics on morphology acquisition, 60 adult English speakers learned to inflect masculine and feminine Russian nouns in nominative, dative, and genitive cases. By varying training vocabulary size (i.e., type variability), holding constant the number of learning trials, we tested whether learners required a "critical mass" of vocabulary to generalize case marking patterns to new nouns. Cattell's Culture-Fair IQ Test mediated the effect of type variability on success in generalizing case marking to new vocabulary: only participants with above-median CultureFair Test scores showed the predicted critical mass effect of better generalization with larger training vocabulary. These results demonstrate how individual differences in central executive functioning and attention allocation capacity can affect adult second language learning.

A B S T R A C TGender agreement elicitation was used with Russian children to examine how diminutives common in Russian child-directed speech affect gender learning. Forty-six children (2 ;9-4 ;8) were shown pictures of familiar and of novel animals and asked to describe them after hearing their names, which all contained regular morphophonological cues to masculine or feminine gender. Half were presented as simplex (e.g. jozh ' porcupine ') and half as diminutive forms (e.g. jozhik 'porcupine-DIM '). Children produced fewer agreement errors for diminutive than for simplex nouns, indicating that the regularizing features of diminutives enhance gender categorization. The study demonstrates how features of child-directed speech can facilitate language learning. I N T R O D U C T I O NGrammatical category learning is a fundamental component of language acquisition because grammatical categories lie at the basis of morphology and [*] This study was supported by NATO collaborative linkage grant #975293 awarded to Patricia Brooks, Olga Fedorova, and Vera Kempe. We would like to thank the children, parents, and staff at day care centres #250, 735, 859, and 2023 of the city of Moscow for their participation and support of the study.

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