Numerous studies have argued that bilingualism has effects on cognitive functions. Recently, in light of increasingly mixed empirical results, this claim has been challenged. One might ponder if there is enough evidence to justify a cessation to future research on the topic or, alternatively, how the field could proceed to better understand the phantom-like appearance of bilingual effects. Herein, we attempt to frame this appearance at the crossroads of several factors such as the heterogeneity of the term ‘bilingual’, sample size effects, task effects, and the complex dynamics between an early publication bias that favours positive results and the subsequent Proteus phenomenon. We conclude that any definitive claim on the topic is premature and that research must continue, albeit in a modified way. To this effect, we offer a path forward for future multi-lab work that should provide clearer answers to whether bilingualism has neurocognitive effects, and if so, under what conditions.

Humans are intuitively good at providing judgments about what forms part of their native language and what does not. Although such judgments are robust, consistent, and reliable, human cognition is demonstrably fallible to illusions of various types. Language is no exception. In the linguistic domain, several types of sentences have been shown to trick the parser into giving them a high acceptability judgment despite their ill-formedness. One example is the so-called comparative illusion (‘More people have been to Tromsø than I have’). To this day, comparative illusions have been tested mainly with monolingual, neurotypical speakers of English. The present research aims to broaden our understanding of this phenomenon by putting it to test in two populations that differ in one crucial factor: the number of languages they speak. A timed acceptability judgment task was administered to monolingual speakers of Standard Greek and bi(dia)lectal speakers of Standard and Cypriot Greek. The results are not fully in line with any of the semantic re-analyses proposed for the illusion so far, hence a new proposal is offered about what interpretation induces the illusion, appreciating the influence of both grammatical processing and cognitive heuristics. Second, the results reveal an effect of developmental trajectory. This effect may be linked to an enhanced ability to spot the illusion in bi(dia)lectals, but several factors can be identified as possible culprits behind this result. After discussing each of them, it is argued that having two grammars may facilitate the setting of a higher processing threshold, something that would entail decreased fallibility to grammatical illusions.

The repeatedly noted absence of case-reports of individuals with schizophrenia and congenital/early developed blindness has led several authors to argue that the latter can confer protective effects against the former. In this work, we present a number of relevant case-reports from different syndromes that show comorbidity of congenital and early blindness with schizophrenia. On the basis of these reports, we argue that a distinction between different types of blindness in terms of the origin of the visual deficit, cortical or peripheral, is crucial for understanding the observed patterns of comorbidity. We discuss the genetic underpinnings and the brain structures involved in schizophrenia and blindness, with insights from language processing, laying emphasis on the three structures that particularly stand out: the occipital cortex, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and the pulvinar. Last, we build on previous literature on the nature of the protective effects in order to offer novel insights into the nature of the protection mechanism from the perspective of the brain structures involved in each type of blindness.

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Background Linguists and psychologists have explained the remarkable similarities in the orderings of linguistic elements across languages by suggesting that our inborn ability for language makes available certain innately wired primitives. Different types of adjectives, adverbs, and other elements in the functional spine are considered to occupy fixed positions via innate hierarchies that determine orderings such as A>B>C, banning other permutations (*B>C>A). The goal of this research is to tap into the nature and rigidity of such hierarchies by comparing what happens when people process orderings that either comply with them or violate them. Method N = 170 neurotypical, adult speakers completed a timed forced choice task that featured stimuli showing a combination of two adjectives and a Spelke-object (e.g., ‘I bought a square black table’). Two types of responses were collected: (i) acceptability judgments on a 3-point Likert scale that featured the options ‘correct’, ‘neither correct nor wrong’, and ‘wrong’ and (ii) reaction times. The task featured three conditions: 1. size adjective > nationality adjective, 2. color adjective > shape adjective, 3. subjective comment adjective > material adjective. Each condition had two orders. In the congruent order, the adjective pair was ordered in agreement with what is traditionally accepted as dictated by the universal hierarchy. In the incongruent order, the ordering was reversed, thus the hierarchy was violated. Results In the first experiment, the results of n = 140 monolinguals showed that across conditions, both congruent and incongruent orders were generally accepted as correct. For 2/3 conditions, the difference in acceptability ratings between congruent and incongruent orders did not reach statistical significance. Using time as a window to processing, reaction times showed that incongruent orders do not take longer to process than congruent ones, as should be the case if the former were treated as being licensed under some type of special condition (e.g., contrastive focus) that reverses the unmarked order and legitimizes the violation of the hierarchy. In the second experiment, the results of n = 30 bidialectals, tested in both language varieties, corroborated the findings of the first experiment. Conclusions Our findings do not provide evidence for an innate hierarchy for adjective ordering that imposes one rigid, unmarked order. We discuss the importance of notions such as subjectivity and inherentness, and show that for some conditions, not only is there no evidence for a hard constraint that bans incongruent orders, but even simple preferences of congruent orders over incongruent ones are hard to discern. Capturing the bigger picture, given that both the hierarchies and their legit permutations have been described as innate, our results reduce the amount of primitives that are cast as innate, eventually offering a deflationist approach to human linguistic cognition.