Purpose Increasing evidence suggests that children with specific language impairment (SLI) have a deficit in inhibition control, but research isolating specific abilities is scarce. The goal of this study was to examine whether children with SLI differ from their peers in resistance to proactive interference under different conditions. Method An information processing battery with manipulations in interference was administered to 66 children (SLI, age-matched peers, and language-matched controls). In Experiment 1, previously relevant targets were used as distractors to create conflict. Experiment 2 used item repetitions to examine how practice strengthens word representations and how the strength of a response impacts performance on the following item. Results Children with SLI performed similarly to their peers in the baseline condition but were more susceptible to proactive interference than the controls in both experimental conditions. Children with SLI demonstrated difficulty suppressing irrelevant information, made significantly more interference errors than their peers, and showed a slower rate of implicit learning. Conclusion Children with SLI show weaker resistance to proactive interference than their peers, and this deficit impacts their information processing abilities. The coordination of activation and inhibition is less efficient in these children, but future research is needed to further examine the interaction between these two processes.

This study aimed to examine the so-called bilingual advantage in older adults’ performance in three cognitive domains and to identify whether language use and bilingual type (dominant vs. balanced) predicted performance. The participants were 106 Spanish–English bilinguals ranging in age from 50 years to 84 years. Three cognitive domains were examined (each by a single test): inhibition (the Simon task), alternating attention (the Trail Making test), and working memory (Month Ordering). The data revealed that age was negatively correlated to performance in each domain. Bilingual type – balanced vs. dominant – predicted performance and interacted with age only on the inhibition measure (the Simon task). Balanced bilinguals showed age-related inhibition decline (i.e., greater Simon effect with increasing age); in contrast, dominant bilinguals showed little or no age-related change. The findings suggest that bilingualism may offer cognitive advantage in older age only for a subset of bilinguals.

Efforts to understand the brain bases of language face the Mapping Problem: At what level do linguistic computations and representations connect to human neurobiology? We review one approach to this problem that relies on rigorously defined computational models to specify the links between linguistic features and neural signals. Such tools can be used to estimate linguistic predictions, model linguistic features, and specify a sequence of processing steps that may be quantitatively fit to neural signals collected while participants use language. Progress has been helped by advances in machine learning, attention to linguistically interpretable models, and openly shared data sets that allow researchers to compare and contrast a variety of models. We describe one such data set in detail in the Supplementary Appendix. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Linguistics, Volume 8 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.