Can exposure to a foreign language in the first year of school enhance divergent thinking skills? Ninety-nine monolingual children from predominantly White neighbourhoods (MAge = 57.7 months, SD 1.2; 47 girls) attending bilingual schools, schools with weekly foreign language lessons, or schools without a foreign language provision (= controls) completed divergent thinking and executive function tasks at the beginning of the school year and 24 weeks later. The groups did not differ on creativity measures at the beginning of the school year. Only bilingual school children and weekly language learners improved divergent thinking at the second testing point, with the former significantly outperforming controls on creative fluency and flexibility. Improvements could not be explained by executive function development. Therefore, a considerable amount of exposure to a foreign language in early formal education appears to boost creative thinking.

Recent approaches to heritage languages have sought to identify explanations for variability in heritage grammars. The present study explores variable patterns of Spanish differential object marking (DOM) in 40 heritage Spanish speakers (HSs) from the United States and 28 Spanish-dominant bilingual speakers (SDSs) from Mexico. Participants completed a picture description task including human, animal and inanimate direct objects. Both groups exhibited patterns of DOM following the Animacy Scale. However, HSs showed lower DOM rates and greater individual variability with human referents compared to SDSs, even when individual differences in language dominance were considered. Conversely, SDSs produced lower rates of DOM with inanimate objects than HSs. DOM use was constrained by verb-specific animacy biases across animacy conditions and speaker groups. These findings reveal that Spanish HSs maintain baseline-like variable patterns of DOM. Moreover, HSs may advance language change in predictable directions based on patterns of variation present in the baseline variety.

Schizophrenia impacts several cognitive systems including language. Linguistic symptoms of schizophrenia are important to understand due to the crucial role that language plays in the diagnostic and treatment process. However, the literature is heavily based on monolingual-centric research. Multilinguals demonstrate differences from monolinguals in language cognition. When someone with schizophrenia is multilingual, how do these differences interact with their symptoms? To address this question, we conducted a pre-registered PRISMA-SR scoping review to determine themes in the literature and identify gaps for future research. Four hundred and twenty records were identified from three databases in 2023. Thirty articles were included in the synthesis. We found three emergent themes: (1) the need for multilingual treatment options, (2) differences in symptomology between the L1 and L2, and (3) the impact of cultural factors on linguistic functioning. Thus, several avenues of research regarding multilingualism may be fruitful for improving linguistic and social outcomes in schizophrenia.

Multilingual language control is commonly investigated using picture-naming paradigms with explicit instructions when to switch between languages. In daily life, language switching also occurs without external cues. Cued language-switching tasks usually show a switch cost (i.e., slower responses on switch than non-switch trials). Findings of switch costs in response times are mixed for voluntary language switching. This pre-registered study uses a bilingual picture-naming paradigm to compare voluntary and cued language switching in 25 highly proficient Dutch-English bilinguals using EEG. We analysed the N2 ERP component and midfrontal theta oscillations, two common electrophysiological markers of cognitive control in task and language switching. We observed significantly smaller behavioural switch costs in the voluntary task. This suggests that voluntary language switching is less effortful than switching based on external cues. However, we found no electrophysiological switch effects in either task. We discuss factors which may contribute to the inconsistency between behavioural and electrophysiological findings.

This study investigated the effect of phonological neighborhood density (PND) on the lexical encoding of perceptually confusable segmental contrasts and the extent to which the precision of encoding is modulated by phonetic categorization and vocabulary size. Korean learners of English and native speakers of American English completed an auditory lexical decision task that contained words and nonwords with /ɛ/, /æ/, /f/, and /p/ (/æ/ and /f/ do not exist in Korean), two phonetic categorization tasks (/ɛ/−/æ/ and /f/−/p/), and a vocabulary test. For the Korean group, participants’ categorization of /f/−/p/ was the only significant predictor of /f/−/p/ nonword rejection. For /ɛ/−/æ/, nonword versions of high PND words were rejected more accurately than low PND. Additionally, vocabulary size and phonetic categorization significantly interacted so that as perception abilities improve, the benefits that come from having a large vocabulary grow as well.

Statistical learning, that is, our ability to track and learn from distributional information in the environment, plays a fundamental role in language acquisition, yet little research has investigated this process in older language learners. In the present study, we address this gap by comparing the cross-situational learning of foreign words in younger and older adults. We also tested whether learning was affected by previous experience with multiple languages. We found that both age groups successfully learned the novel words after a short exposure period, confirming that statistical learning ability is preserved in late adulthood. However, the two groups differed in their learning trajectories, with the younger group outperforming the older group during the later stages of learning. Previous language experience did not predict learning outcomes. Given that implicit language learning mechanisms are shown to be preserved over the lifespan, the present data provide crucial support for the assumptions underlying claims that language learning interventions in older age could be leveraged as a targeted intervention to help build or maintain resilience to age-related cognitive decline.

This study investigated the predictive use of dative verb constraints in Mandarin among home-country-raised native speakers and classroom learners (including both sequential L2 learners and heritage speakers). In a visual world eye-tracking experiment, participants made anticipatory looks to the upcoming argument (recipient versus theme) following categorical restrictions of non-alternating verbs and gradient bias of alternating verbs before the acoustic onset of the disambiguating noun. Crucially, no delay or reduction in the prediction effects was observed among L2 learners and heritage speakers in comparison with home-country-raised native speakers. Mandarin proficiency and dominant language (English versus other) did not modulate prediction effects among classroom learners. These findings provide direct support for the assumption of error-driven learning accounts of the dative alternation, that is, language users actively predict upcoming arguments based on verb information during real-time sentence processing.