Do bilinguals have similar bilingual control mechanisms in speaking and writing? The present study investigated the patterns of switch costs (reflecting reactive language control) and mixing costs (reflecting proactive language control) between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) in spoken and written productions and whether these patterns could be modulated by response-stimulus intervals (RSIs). In two experiments, unbalanced Chinese–English bilinguals completed a cued language switching task in spoken naming (Experiment 1) and written naming (Experiment 2), respectively. The results revealed asymmetrical switch costs (i.e., the larger cost in L1 than in L2) in spoken and written productions in the short RSI condition. However, there were asymmetrical mixing costs in spoken production and symmetrical mixing costs in written production both in the short and long RSIs. These findings suggest that for spoken and written productions, reactive language control operates in similar mechanisms, while proactive language control operates in specific mechanisms.

Most cognate research suggests facilitation effects in picture naming, but how these effects manifest in bilinguals after brain damage remains unclear. Additionally, whether this effect is captured in clinical measures is largely unknown. Using data from the Boston Naming Test, we examined the naming of cognates and noncognates, the extent of cognate facilitation produced, and the individual differences in bilingual language experience associated with naming outcomes in forty Spanish–English bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA) relative to thirty-one Spanish–English healthy bilinguals (HB). Results suggest that naming performance in L1 and L2 in both groups is modulated by lexical frequency, bilingual language experience, and by language impairment in BPWA. Although the two groups showed similarities, they deviated in benefit drawn from the extent of phoneme/grapheme overlap in cognate items. HB showed an association between cognate facilitation and bilingual language experience, while cognate facilitation in BPWA was only associated with L2 language impairment.

Language control in bilinguals is often investigated with the language switching paradigm. Switch costs reflect the ease/difficulty of applying this control mechanism. The type of stimuli employed in the experiments may influence switch costs. To date, only one study has compared digit vs picture processing, reporting reduced switch costs for digits (Declerck, Koch & Philipp, 2012). This result was adjudicated to phonological overlap between the languages used. Crucially, it remains an open question whether this digit effect generalises to language combinations without phonological relation. We fill this gap by investigating language switching with two language pairs differing in relative proficiency (L1 Chinese–L2 English, L1 Chinese–L3 French), where cross-language phonological activation is not expected. Overall, a digit effect is observed in the Chinese–English pair. Contrary to Declerck et al.'s (2012) finding, digits increased switch costs. Phonological mediation cannot explain this effect; instead, we suggest its origin lies in within-language word association links.

Bilingual speakers are less accurate and slower than monolinguals in word production. This bilingual cost has been demonstrated primarily for nouns. This study compared verb and noun retrieval to better understand bilingual lexical representation and test alternate hypotheses about bilingual cost. Picture naming speeds from highly proficient English–Spanish bilinguals showed a smaller bilingual cost for verbs compared to nouns. In Experiment 1, picture naming speeds were influenced by name agreement, age-of-acquisition and word length. Additionally, noun (but not verb) naming speed was predicted by word frequency. Experiment 2 examined two potential explanations for the smaller bilingual cost for verbs: verbs experience weaker cross-language interference (measured by translation speed) and smaller frequency effects. Both these predictions were confirmed, showing crucial differences between verbs and nouns and suggesting that cross-language facilitation rather than interference influences bilingual lexical retrieval, and that the frequency lag account of bilingual cost is more applicable to nouns than to verbs. We propose a Bilingual Integrated Grammatical Category model for highly proficient bilinguals to represent lexical category differences.

Second language (L2) speakers produce speech more slowly than first language (L1) speakers. This may be due to a delay in lexical retrieval, but it is also possible that the delay is situated at later stages. This study used delayed picture naming to test whether late production stages (leading up to articulation) are slower in L2 than in L1. Dutch–English unbalanced bilinguals performed a regular and a delayed picture naming task in English and Dutch. Monolingual English controls performed these tasks in English. Speakers were slower when naming pictures in L2 during regular picture naming but not in delayed naming. Reaction time costs of using L2 did not vary with phonological complexity, but there was a larger L2 cost in accuracy with more complex words. We conclude that the very last stages prior to articulation are not significantly slower when bilinguals name pictures in their L2.

Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in school-aged children. In Study 1, children named a series of contiguous, semantically related pictures. The results revealed no cumulative interference effects. Study 2 utilized an approach more closely aligned with adult methods, incorporating intervening, unrelated items intermixed with semantically related items within a continuous list. Study 2 showed a linear increase in reaction time as a function of ordinal position within semantic sets. These findings demonstrate cumulative semantic interference effects in young, school-aged children that are consistent with experience-driven changes in the connections that underlie lexical access. They invite further investigation of how children's lexical representation and processing are shaped by speaking experiences.

The finding that noun production is slower and less accurate in bilinguals compared to monolinguals is well replicated, but not well understood. This study examined the two prominent theoretical accounts for this bilingual effect: weaker links and cross-language interference. Highly proficient Mandarin–English bilinguals and English-speaking monolinguals named pictures in which the effects of grammatical class, word frequency and translatability were examined. While bilinguals were slower overall than monolinguals in both L1 and L2, the magnitude of this bilingual effect was smaller for verbs than for nouns. Bilinguals showed a larger production advantage for high vs. low frequency words in their L2 relative to monolinguals and their L1. Bilinguals also showed an advantage for words with greater translatability, which did not differ across grammatical categories. The findings lend partial support to the weaker links account, and reveal cross-language facilitation rather than interference.

Pictures are complex stimuli that require a careful control of several characteristics and attributes standardized for different languages. In this work we present for the first time European Portuguese (EP) norms for name agreement, concept familiarity, subjective frequency and visual complexity for a new set of 150 colored pictures. These pictures were selected to represent exemplars of the most used semantic categories in research and to depict objects which, though familiar to the participants, were rarely used in daily life, which makes them particularly prone to speech failures such as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states. Norms were collected from 640 EP native speakers that rated each picture in the four variables through a web-survey procedure. Results showed, as expected, that a large number of pictures in the dataset elicited a TOT response, and additionally that the ratings obtained in each of the dimensions are in line with those observed in other pictorial datasets. Norms can be freely downloaded at https://www.psi.uminho.pt/en/Research/Psycholinguistics/Pages/Databases.aspx

Proficient bilinguals demonstrate slower lexical retrieval than comparable monolinguals. The present study tested predictions from two main accounts of this effect, the frequency-lag and competition hypotheses. Both make the same prediction for bilinguals but differ for trilinguals and for age differences. 200 younger or older adults who were monolingual, bilingual, or trilingual performed a picture naming task in English that included high and low frequency words. Naming times were faster for high than for low frequency words and, in line with frequency-lag, group differences were larger for low than high frequency items. However, on all other measures, bilinguals and trilinguals performed equivalently, and lexical retrieval differences between language groups did not attenuate with age, consistent with the competition view.

Cued language switching is used to examine language-control processes by comparing performance in language-switch trials with performance in repetition trials. In 1:1 cue-to-language mappings, language repetitions involve cue repetitions and language switches involve cue switches. Hence, the observed switch costs might reflect cue-switch costs rather than language-related control processes. By introducing a 2:1 cue-to-language mapping, we dissociated language switches (cue and language switched vs. cue switched, but language repeated) and cue switches (repeated language, with vs. without switched cue). We found cue-switch costs, but language-related switch costs were substantial, too, presumably reflecting language-control processes in cued language switching.

Objectives: We examined performance on the Boston Naming Test (BNT) in older and younger adults who were monolingual English or French speakers, or bilingual speakers of English and French (n=215). Methods: Monolingual participants completed the task in their native language, and bilingual participants completed the task in English, French, and bilingual (either-language) administrations. Results: Overall, younger and older monolingual French speakers performed worse than other groups; bilingual participants performed worst in the French administration and approximately two-thirds of bilingual participants performed better when responses were accepted in either language. Surprisingly, however, a subset of bilinguals performed worse when responses were accepted in either language as compared to their maximum score achieved in either English or French. This either-language disadvantage does not appear to be associated with the degree of balanced bilingualism, but instead appears to be related to overall naming abilities. Differential item analysis comparing language groups and the different administrations identified several items that displayed uniform and/or non-uniform differential item functioning (DIF). Conclusions: The BNT does not elicit equivalent performance in English and French, even when assessing naming performance in monolingual French speakers using the French version of the test. Scores were lower in French overall, and several items exhibited DIF. We recommend caution in interpreting performance on these items in bilingual speakers. Finally, not all bilinguals benefit from an either-language administration of the BNT. (JINS, 2015, 21, 350–363)

Much research on language control in bilinguals has relied on the interpretation of the costs of switching between two languages. Of the two types of costs that are linked to language control, switching costs are assumed to be transient in nature and modulated by trial-specific manipulations (e.g., by preparation time), while mixing costs are supposed to be more stable and less affected by trial-specific manipulations. The present study investigated the effect of preparation time on switching and mixing costs, revealing that both types of costs can be influenced by trial-specific manipulations.

This study investigated the relationship between bilingualism and task switching ability using a standardized measure of switching and an objective measure of bilingual language proficiency. Heritage Language (HL) speaking Spanish-English and Mandarin-English bilinguals and English speaking monolinguals completed all four subtests of the Color-Word Interference Test (CWIT), an English verbal fluency task, and a picture naming test (the Multilingual Naming Test) in English. Bilinguals also named pictures in their HL to assess HL proficiency. Spanish-English bilinguals were advantaged in task switching, exhibiting significantly smaller switching cost than monolinguals, but were disadvantaged in verbal fluency and picture naming. Additionally, performance on these cognitive and linguistic tasks was related to degree of HL proficiency, so that increased ability to name pictures in Spanish was associated with greater switching advantage, and greater disadvantage in both verbal fluency and picture naming. Mandarin-English bilinguals, who differed from the Spanish-English bilinguals on several demographic and language-use characteristics, exhibited a smaller but statistically significant switching advantage, but no linguistic disadvantage, and no clear relationship between HL proficiency and the switching advantage. Together these findings demonstrate an explicit link between objectively measured bilingual language proficiency and both bilingual advantages and disadvantages, while also showing that consequences of bilingualism for cognitive and linguistic task performance can vary across different language combinations. (JINS, 2015, 21, 531–544)

In this study, we investigated dual-language decline in non-balanced bilinguals with probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD) both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. We examined patients’ naming accuracy on the Boston Naming Test (BNT: Kaplan et al., 1983) over three testing sessions (longitudinal analysis) and compared their performance to that of matched controls (cross-sectional analysis). We found different longitudinal and cross-sectional patterns of decline: Longitudinally, the non-dominant language seemed to decline more steeply than the dominant language, but, cross-sectionally, differences between patients and controls were larger for the dominant than for the non-dominant language, especially at the initial testing session. This differential pattern of results for cross-sectional versus longitudinal decline was supported by correlations between decline measures and BNT item characteristics. Further studies will be needed to better characterize the nature of linguistic decline in bilinguals with AD; however, these results suggest that representational robustness of individual lexical representations, rather than language membership, might determine the time course of decline for naming in bilinguals with AD. (JINS, 2014, 20, 1–13)

Twenty-seven Mandarin–English bilingual children participated in picture identification and picture naming tasks at two time points, 16 months apart. The younger children (mean age = 4 years) showed greater gains over time than the older children (mean age = 6 years 10 months) in English lexical-semantic skills and neither group showed significant gains in Mandarin. At the individual level, a majority of the children showed increased accuracy for the English tasks, but only half of them did so for the Mandarin tasks. Analyses of error distribution indicated production of more advanced error types in the older children and in English, as well as different patterns of time-related changes in error types in the two languages. These findings illustrate how age and initial language proficiency are related to lexical growth among Mandarin-speaking bilingual children who are becoming English-dominant.

This study examines the convergence and divergence between subjective and objective measures of language proficiency for assessing language dominance in Mandarin–English bilinguals. Sixty-two young adults (Experiment 1) and 27 children (Experiment 2) provided self-ratings of proficiency level (or were rated by their parents), were interviewed for spoken proficiency, and named pictures in the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT) and (in Experiment 1 only) the Boston Naming Test. In Experiment 1, the four measures converged in the number of people classified into different dominance groups but both naming tests indicated greater English dominance than self-report and interview measures. In Experiment 2, parent report and interview measures converged in dominance classifications but the MINT indicated higher degrees of English dominance. To a large extent bilinguals were able to classify themselves (or their children) into dominance groups but some mismatches between measures in dominance classification were observed for all age and dominance groups. These results, together with previous findings with Spanish–English bilingual adults (Gollan et al., 2012), suggest that bilinguals may shift to English dominance in confrontation naming before they do so in conversational fluency, and that dominance shifts persist throughout the lifespan but may be relatively more pronounced in children. These findings caution against the use of self-reports as the sole means of classifying bilinguals into dominance groups and support a multi-measure approach including direct assessment of the relevant linguistic domain.

The current study explored the picture naming performance of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). First, we evaluated the utility of the Multilingual Naming Test (MINT; Gollan et al., 2011), which was designed to assess naming skills in speakers of multiple languages, for detecting naming impairments in monolingual AD and amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). If the MINT were sensitive to linguistic impairment in AD, using it in clinical practice might have advantages over using tests exclusively designed for English monolinguals. We found that the MINT can be used with both monolinguals and bilinguals: A 32-item subset of the MINT is best for distinguishing monolingual patients from controls, while the full MINT is best for assessing degree of bilingualism and language dominance in bilinguals. We then investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying naming impairment in AD. To this end, we explored which MINT item characteristics best predicted performance differences between monolingual patients and controls. We found that contextual diversity and imageability, but not word frequency (nor words’ number of senses), contributed unique variance to explaining naming impairments in AD. These findings suggest a semantic component to the naming impairment in AD (modulated by names’ semantic richness and network size). (JINS, 2013, 19, 1–12)

This study examined the nature of bilinguals’ conceptual representations and the links from these representations to words in L1 and L2. Specifically, we tested an assumption of the Bilingual Dual Coding Theory that conceptual representations include image representations, and that learning two languages in separate contexts can result in differences in referential images for L1 and L2. Mandarin–English participants named aloud culturally-biased images and culturally-unbiased filler images presented on a computer screen in both Mandarin (L1) and English (L2). Culturally-biased images were named significantly faster in the culturally-congruent language than in the incongruent language. These findings indicate that some image representations are more strongly connected to one language than the other, providing support for the Bilingual Dual Coding Theory.