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This study investigated the possibility that lifelong bilingualism may lead to enhanced efficiency in the ability to shift between mental sets. We compared the performance of monolingual and fluent bilingual college students in a task-switching paradigm. Bilinguals incurred reduced switching costs in the task-switching paradigm when compared with monolinguals, suggesting that lifelong experience in switching between languages may contribute to increased efficiency in the ability to shift flexibly between mental sets. On the other hand, bilinguals did not differ from monolinguals in the differential cost of performing mixed-task as opposed to single-task blocks. Together, these results indicate that bilingual advantages in executive function most likely extend beyond inhibition of competing responses, and encompass flexible mental shifting as well.

We used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the contributions of explicit and implicit processes during second language (L2) sentence comprehension. We used a L2 grammaticality judgment task (GJT) to test 20 native English speakers enrolled in the first four semesters of Spanish while recording both accuracy and ERP data. Because end-of-sentence grammaticality judgments are open to conscious inspection, we reasoned that they can be influenced by strategic processes that reflect on formal rules and therefore reflect primarily offline explicit processing. On the other hand, because ERPs are a direct reflection of online processing, they reflect automatic, nonreflective, implicit responses to stimuli (Osterhout, Bersick, & McLaughlin, 1997; Rugg et al., 1998; Tachibana et al., 1999).We used a version of the GJT adapted for the ERP environment. The experimental sentences varied the form of three different syntactic constructions: (a) tense-marking, which is formed similarly in the first language (L1) and the L2; (b) determiner number agreement, which is formed differently in the L1 and the L2; and (c) determiner gender agreement, which is unique to the L2. We examined ERP responses during a time period between 500 and 900 ms following the onset of the critical (violation or matched control) word in the sentence because extensive past research has shown that grammatical violations elicit a positive-going deflection in the ERP waveform during this period (e.g., the “P600”; Osterhout & Holcomb, 1992).We found that learners were sensitive (i.e., showed different brain responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences) to violations in L2 for constructions that are formed similarly in the L1 and the L2, but were not sensitive to violations for constructions that differ in the L1 and the L2. Critically, a robust grammaticality effect was found in the ERP data for the construction that was unique to the L2, suggesting that the learners were implicitly sensitive to these violations. Judgment accuracy was near chance for all constructions. These findings suggest that learners are able to implicitly process some aspects of L2 syntax even in early stages of learning but that this knowledge depends on the similarity between the L1 and the L2. Furthermore, there is a divergence between explicit and implicit measures of L2 learning, which might be due to the behavioral task demands (e.g., McLaughlin, Osterhout, & Kim, 2004). We conclude that comparing ERP and behavioral data could provide a sensitive method for measuring implicit processing.This research was supported by a National Institutes of Health Individual National Research Service Award (NIH HD42948-01) awarded to Natasha Tokowicz and a National Institutes of Health Institutional National Research Service Award (T32 MH19102) awarded to Brian MacWhinney. We thank Beatrice DeAngelis, Dayne Grove, Kwan Hansongkitpong, Katie Keil, Lee Osterhout, Chuck Perfetti, Kelley Sacco, Alex Waid, and Eddie Wlotko for their assi...

Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian U n i v e r s i t ä t P o t s d a mHumanwissenschaftliche Fakultät fi rst published in:

The study of language acquisition underwent a major revolution in the late 1950s as a result of the dissemination of technology permitting high-quality tape-recording of children in the family setting. This new technology led to major breakthroughs in the quality of both data and theory. The field is now at the threshold of a possible second major breakthrough stimulated by the dissemination of personal computing. Researchers are now able to transcribe tape-recorded data into computer files. With this new medium it is easy to conduct global searches for word combinations across collections of files. It is also possible to enter new codings of the basic text line. Because of the speed and accuracy with which computer files can be copied, it is now much easier to share data between researchers. To foster this sharing of computerized data, a group of child language researchers has established the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). This article details the formation of the CHILDES, the governance of the system, the nature of the database, the shape of the coding conventions, and the types of computer programs being developed.