The field of psycholinguistics has long documented how communicating in a second language (L2) can be more challenging than communicating in a first language (L1) because of factors such as low L2 proficiency, accent, and L1 versus L2 differences in the appreciation of semantic or pragmatic nuance (e.g., the emotional connotations or words). Moreover, given that language performance is a primary medium through which people both express their personality and evaluate the personality characteristics of others, these differences in bilingual language processing have important consequences for real-world social interaction. Accordingly, when bilinguals interact with others in their L2, they stand the chance of being misunderstood or misjudged partly because of L1 versus L2 communicative challenges, which can have high-stakes consequences depending on the particular social setting in question. In this article, we selectively review the psycholinguistic literature pertaining to L2 proficiency, emotion, and personality, and apply this knowledge to how communicative effectiveness may be reduced in real-world medical and legal settings. We conclude that increased awareness of these phenomena, and the reasons behind them, can help professionals in the health and legal systems more effectively interact with nonnative speakers. We hope that such increased awareness will lead to the provision of higher quality services to bilingual people. What is the significance of this article for the general public?The significance of this article to the general public is that it draws attention to several communication challenges that bilingual people face in real-world medical and legal settings. These challenges include low L2 proficiency, accent, and the appreciation of semantic or pragmatic nuance. Our ultimate goal is to increase awareness about these issues in a manner that will lead to the provision of higher quality medical and legal services to bilingual people.

Each culture has a distinct set of features that contribute to a unique communication style. For example, bilinguals often balance multiple social contexts and may undergo cognitive changes that consequently support different communication styles. The present work examines how individual differences in bilingual experience affect one form of communication style: sarcastic and indirect language. A diverse sample of largely bilingual adults (first language English) rated their likelihood of using sarcastic and indirect language across different daily settings. They also rated their second language experience. There were two key findings: Bilinguals use sarcasm for similar social functions as do monolinguals (general sarcasm, frustration diffusion, and

Bilinguals juggle knowledge of multiple languages, including syntactic constructions that can mismatch (e.g., the red car, la voiture rouge; Mary sees it, Mary le voit). We used eye-tracking to examine whether French-English (n = 23) and English-French (n = 21) bilingual adults activate non-target language syntax during English L2 (Experiment 1) and L1 (Experiment 2) reading, and whether this differed from functionally monolingual English reading (Experiment 3, n = 26). People read English sentences containing syntactic constructions that were either partially shared across languages (adjective-noun constructions) or completely unshared (object-pronoun constructions). These constructions were presented in an intact form, or in a violated form that was French-consistent or French-inconsistent. For both L2 and L1 reading, bilinguals read French-consistent adjective-noun violations relatively quickly, suggesting cross-language activation. This did not occur when the same people read object-pronoun constructions manipulated in the same manner. Surprisingly, English readers exposed to French in their lifetime but functionally monolingual, also read French-consistent violations for adjective-noun constructions faster, particularly for some items. However, when we controlled for item differences in the L2 and L1 reading data, cross-language effects observed were similar to the original data pattern. Moreover, individual differences in L2 experience modulated both L2 and L1 reading for adjective-noun constructions, consistent with a cross-language activation interpretation of the data. These findings are consistent with the idea of syntactic cross-language activation during reading for some constructions. However, for several reasons, cross-language syntactic activation during comprehension may be overall more variable and challenging to investigate methodologically compared to past work on other forms of cross-language activation (i.e., single words).

In daily life, we experience dynamic visual input referred to as the “linguistic landscape” (LL), comprised of images and text, for example, signs, and billboards (Gorter, 2013; Landry & Bourhis, 1997; Shohamy, Ben-Rafael and Barni 2010). While much is known about LLs descriptively, less is known about what people notice when viewing LLs. Building upon the bilingual eye movement reading literature (e.g., Whitford, Pivneva, & Titone, 2016) and the scene viewing literature (e.g., Henderson & Ferreira, 2004), we report a preliminary study of French-English bilinguals’ eye movements as they viewed LL images from Montréal. These preliminary data suggest that eye tracking is a promising new method for investigating how people with different language backgrounds process real-world LL images.