A bilingual exhibits a “semantic accent” when they comprehend or use a word in one language in a way that is influenced by its translation. Semantic accents are well-captured by feature-based models: however, few studies have specifically examined the processing of features that contribute to a semantic accent. Japanese–English bilinguals and monolinguals of each language completed three feature-based tasks focusing on culture-specific semantic features. Bilinguals exhibited semantic accents in L1 and L2 in that they had stronger associations than monolinguals between the features specific to one culture and words in the other language. Within bilinguals, culture-specific features were more strongly associated with the congruent language than the incongruent language. Finally, changes in the strengths of associations between culture-specific features and words depended more on L2 cultural immersion than L2 proficiency. Semantic accents lessened in L2 and increased in L1 after many years of exposure to the L2 culture.

This special issue began as a conference on Bilingual and Multilingual Interaction at Bangor University in 2012. The papers collected here all have novel elements, either because of their innovative methods, their unusual data, or their unexpected findings. They present findings from studies of bilinguals speaking six different pairs of languages, and use a range of methods including experiments, naturalistic observation and auditory judgment data. Despite the differences in subject matter and methodological approaches, all the papers demonstrate that bilinguals draw on resources which are different from those of monolinguals. They show that the two languages spoken by bilinguals have clearly discernible effects on one another, and that these effects can potentially be enhancing. Future research will no doubt build on the studies presented here and extend our understanding of cross-language effects in bilingual production and comprehension.

Japanese–English bilinguals completed a masked phonological priming study with Japanese Katakana primes and English targets. Event related potential (ERP) data were collected in addition to lexical decision responses. A cross-script phonological priming effect was observed in both measures, and the effect did not interact with frequency. In the ERP data, the phonological priming effect was evident before the frequency effect. These data, along with analyses of response latency distributions, provide evidence that the cross-script phonological priming effects were the consequence of the activation of sublexical phonological representations in a store shared by both Japanese and English. This activation fed back to sublexical and lexical orthographic representations, influencing lexical decision latencies. The implications for the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model of word recognition are discussed.