This study asks whether filled pauses actively engage attention and whether such engagement influences structural processing, measured through structural alignment. Participants orally described a series of pictures, then listened to a short informational passage and answered questions about it, and then described another series of pictures. Participants completed this twice: The first passage had double-object targets, and the second passage had passive targets. Critically, one of the passages contained filled pauses (before the verb in target sentences), and the other did not. We measured participants' pupil diameter in target sentences, an index of attention engagement, and pupil size synchrony, an index of moment-to-moment shared attention across observers. For speech with filled pauses compared to without, we found that pupil size was larger overall, peaking after the filled pause appeared, and higher synchrony across listeners. We interpret this as evidence that filled pauses actively engage attention. However, we did not detect a structural alignment effect in any condition, and thus found no evidence for an influence of filled pauses on structural processing (or, in another analysis, comprehension accuracy). These results suggest that filled pauses before the verb attract attention in the moment but do not influence downstream structural processing and general memory for content.

Variability in the second language (L2) referential choice could be due to lower language proficiency in the L2 or cross-linguistic influence. We compare the L2 English referential choices of bilinguals of typologically different languages (Spanish and English, null subject and non-null subject) to those of bilinguals of typologically similar languages (Dutch and English, both non-null subject and both using pronouns similarly in the target context). Bilinguals' performance was further compared to that of a group of functional monolingual English speakers. Both bilingual groups were highly proficient, to explore whether high proficiency would attenuate differences with monolinguals. Participants completed a picture-description task eliciting references to antecedents in two-character contexts. Performance was comparable among all three groups in all conditions-evidence that cross-linguistic influence did not play a role for bilingual referential choices. These results thus show that highly proficient bilinguals of both typologically different and similar languages can perform comparably to monolinguals.

Second-language speakers are more likely to strategically reuse the words of their conversation partners (Zhang & Nicol, 2022). This study investigates if this is also the case for lower-proficiency bilinguals from a bilingual community, who use language more implicitly, and if there is more alignment with lower than with higher proficiency, provided the words to be aligned to are all highly familiar. In two experiments, Spanish-English bilinguals took turns with a confederate to name and match pictures in Spanish. The confederate named critical pictures with a dispreferred but acceptable name (e.g., agua [Sp. water] for a picture of rain). In Experiment 1, bilinguals were more likely to name critical pictures with dispreferred names after hearing these names from the confederate than after the confederate named an unrelated picture instead (i.e., an alignment effect). In support of our hypothesis, there was more alignment in lower-proficiency speakers. In Experiment 2, designed to reduce the possibility for strategic alignment, only confederates but not participants performed the matching task, which precluded participants from linking the dispreferred names with a referent, and removed the incentive to pay attention to the confederate's names. As a result, alignment was reduced (though still present). Of most interest, the reduction was greater for lower-proficiency speakers, supporting the hypothesis that strategic lexical-referential alignment is more likely with lower proficiency even for bilinguals from a bilingual community. The study also isolates measurable strategic and automatic components of lexical-referential alignment.

Research on language contact outcomes, such as code-switching, continues to face theoretical and methodological challenges, particularly due to the difficulty of comparing findings across studies that use divergent data collection methods. Accordingly, scholars have emphasized the need for publicly available and comparable bilingual corpora. This paper introduces the El Paso Bilingual Corpus, a new Spanish–English bilingual corpus recorded in El Paso (TX) in 2022, designed to be methodologically comparable to the Bangor Miami Corpus. The paper is structured in three main sections. First, we review the existing Spanish–English corpora and examine the theoretical challenges posed by studies using non-comparable methodologies, thereby underscoring the gap addressed by the El Paso Bilingual Corpus. Second, we outline the corpus creation process, discussing participant recruitment, data collection, and transcription, and provide an overview of these data, including participants’ sociolinguistic profiles. Third, to demonstrate the practical value of methodologically aligned corpora, we report a comparative case study on diminutive expressions in the El Paso and Bangor Miami corpora, illustrating how shared collection protocols can elucidate the role of community-specific social factors on bilinguals’ morphosyntactic choices.

In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs. Priming occurred from ungrammatical double-object primes involving different non-alternating verbs (Experiment 1) and from grammatical primes involving alternating verbs (Experiment 2), supporting abstract statistical learning within the L2. However, we found no differences between L1-Germanic speakers (who have the double object structure in their L1) and L1-Romance speakers (who do not), inconsistent with the prediction for between-group differences of the L1-generalization account. Additionally, L2 speakers in Experiment 2 showed a lexical boost: There was stronger priming after (dispreferred) non-alternating same-verb double object primes than after (grammatical) alternating different-verb primes. Such lexically-driven persistence was also shown by L1 English speakers (Ivanova et al., 2012a) and may underlie statistical learning of lexically-dependent structural regularities. We conclude that lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in highly proficient and immersed L2 speakers are shaped by statistical learning (both abstract and lexically-specific) within the L2, but not by generalization from the L1.

The burgeoning field of third language (L3) acquisition has increasingly focused on intermediate stages of language development, aiming to establish the groundwork for comprehensive models of L3 learning that encompass the entire developmental sequence. This article underscores the importance of a robust epistemological foundation, advocating for incremental knowledge building through longitudinal research. In the study presented here, we use artificial languages to investigate L3 acquisition from initial exposure with complete input control, factoring in individual differences in executive functions and history of bilingual exposure/engagement to assess the role of these variables in shaping learning trajectories and modulating cross-linguistic influence (CLI). This approach not only advances our understanding of L3 development under controlled conditions but also links L3 acquisition research to broader cognitive science inquiries.

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Abstract This chapter is dedicated to the contribution of the theoretical review of Costa, Pickering, and Sorace (2008) to our understanding of alignment in second-language dialogue, or, more broadly, conversations involving at least one less proficient speaker. We first briefly describe the review’s foundation, the Interactive Alignment Account, and some of its theoretical considerations. We then highlight the main hypotheses put forward by Costa et al. (2008), following each with subsequently obtained relevant evidence. As proposed by these authors, the emerging picture is indeed one in which second-language dialogue is characterized by enhanced non-automatic alignment and, in some cases, reduced automatic alignment, with important roles of audience design, second-language proficiency, and modeling behavior. While recent advances have been made in this area, some of Costa et al.’s (2008) hypotheses have not been tested, and some have produced conflicting evidence; we thus end with a list of research questions aimed to inspire future work on this topic.

Bilinguals need to control interference from the nontarget language, to avoid saying words in the wrong language. This study investigates how often bilinguals apply such control in a dual-language mode, when speaking one language after the other when the two languages cannot be used interchangeably: over and over (every time they say a word), or only once (the first time they use a word or language after a language switch). Three groups of Spanish-English bilinguals named pictures first in their dominant, then in their nondominant, and then again in their dominant language; a fourth control group of bilinguals named pictures in their dominant language throughout. The study targeted language control aftereffects on the dominant language after nondominant naming, typically assumed to reflect recovery from previously applied inhibition. If the dominant language is inhibited every time a nondominant word is produced, subsequent dominant-language naming latencies should increase in proportion to the number of pictures previously named in the nondominant language. We found, however, that the number of nondominant picture-naming trials did not affect subsequent naming latencies in the dominant language, despite ample statistical power to detect such effects if they existed. The results suggest that, in a dual-language mode, bilingual (inhibitory) control is applied over a word's translation upon the word's first mention but not over and over with subsequent repetitions. This conclusion holds true equally for inhibitory and non-inhibitory language control mechanisms.

This study asks if monolinguals can resolve lexical interference within a language with mechanisms similar to those used by bilinguals to resolve interference across languages. These mechanisms are known as bilingual language control, are assumed to be at least in part top-down, and are typically studied with cued language mixing, a version of which we use here. Balanced (Experiment 1) and nonbalanced Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) named pictures in each of their languages. English monolinguals from two different American cities (Experiments 3 and 4) named pictures in English only with either basic-level (e.g., shoe) or subordinate names (e.g., sneaker). All experiments were identically structured and began with blocked naming in each language or name type, followed by trial-level switching between the two languages or name types, followed again by blocked naming. We analyzed switching, mixing and (introduced here) post-mixing costs, dominance effects and repetition benefits. In the bilingual experiments, we found some signs of dominant deprioritization, the behavioral hallmark of bilingual language control: larger costs for dominant- than for nondominant-language names. Crucially, in the monolingual experiments, we also found signs of dominant deprioritization: larger costs for basic-level than for subordinate names. Unexpectedly and only in the monolingual experiments, we also found a complete dominance reversal: Basic-level names (which otherwise behaved as dominant) were produced more slowly overall than subordinate names. Taken together, these results are hard to explain with the bottom-up mechanisms typically assumed for monolingual interference resolution. We thus conclude that top-down mechanisms might (sometimes) be involved in lexical interference resolution not only between languages but also within a language.

Two picture-matching-game experiments investigated if lexical-referential alignment to non-native speakers is enhanced by a desire to aid communicative success (by saying something the conversation partner can certainly understand), a form of audience design. In Experiment 1, a group of native speakers of British English that was not given evidence of their conversation partners’ picture-matching performance showed more alignment to non-native than to native speakers, while another group that was given such evidence aligned equivalently to the two types of speaker. Experiment 2, conducted with speakers of Castilian Spanish, replicated the greater alignment to non-native than native speakers without feedback. However, Experiment 2 also showed that production of grammatical errors by the confederate produced no additional increase of alignment even though making errors suggests lower communicative competence. We suggest that this pattern is consistent with another collaborative strategy, the desire to model correct usage. Together, these results support a role for audience design in alignment to non-native speakers in structured task-based dialogue, but one that is strategically deployed only when deemed necessary.

Under the Interface Hypothesis, bilinguals' non-nativelike referential choices may be influenced by the increased cognitive demands and less automatic processing of bilingual production. We test this hypothesis by comparing pronoun production in the L2 of nonbalanced Spanish-English bilinguals to that of English monolinguals in two cognitively challenging contexts. In Experiment 1, both monolinguals and bilinguals produced more explicit references when part of the information was unavailable to their addressee (privileged ground) than when all information was shared (common ground), evidencing audience design. In Experiment 2, verbal load led to more unspecified references than visual load and no load (an effect statistically indistinguishable between groups but numerically driven by the monolingual group). While bilinguals produced overall more pronouns than monolinguals in both experiments, there was no indication that bilinguals' referential choice was disproportionally affected by increased cognitive demand, contrary to the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis.

In the Interactive Alignment Theory, alignment is promoted by dialogic features on a dialogue-monologue continuum. More alignment in prototypical dialogue (a chat among friends) than in prototypical monologue (a lecture) seems plausible, but the role of other dialogic features for alignment is less clear. The current study tests the joint influence of two such features: communicative intent and a live interlocutor. Four structural priming experiments contrasted the magnitude of structural alignment between a dialogue situation that involved a joint task and an otherwise identical monologue situation that lacked a communicative component. None of the four experiments showed any statistical differences in alignment between dialogue and monologue. Post-hoc analyses on the pooled data of Experiments 2–4 further suggested that individual differences in attention (operationalized through reaction time variability in the picture verification component of the task we used to elicit alignment) might modulate overall structural alignment, and that dialogue (presumably through sustaining attention) might be able to sustain alignment over time to a greater extent than monologue. These results suggest a role for attention in supporting structural alignment, but the lack of clear differences between alignment magnitudes in monologue and dialogue (absent in individual experiments and weak even in the pooled analyses) suggests that communicative intent and a physically-present interlocutor have at best a minor role in promoting alignment.

To investigate whether similar control processes are used during single and dual language production, we compared register switching (formal and informal speech in the same language) vs. language switching (French and English). The results across two experiments showed a positive correlation of overall register- and language-switch costs and similar formal French switch costs across the two switching tasks. However, whereas increasing the cue-to-stimulus interval resulted in a reduction of language-switch costs, register-switch costs were unaffected by the interval manipulation. This difference in switch-cost pattern indicates that control processes are not entirely identical during single and dual language production.

Four picture-description experiments investigated if syntactic formulation in language production can proceed with only minimal working memory involvement. Experiments 1-3 compared the initiation latencies, utterance durations, and errors for syntactically simpler picture descriptions (adjective-noun phrases, e.g., the red book) to those of more complex descriptions (relative clauses, e.g., the book that is red). In Experiment 4, the syntactically more complex descriptions were also lexically more complex (e.g., the book and the car vs. the book). Simpler and more complex descriptions were produced under verbal memory load consisting of 2 or 4 unrelated nouns, or under no load. Across experiments, load actually made production more efficient (as manifested in shorter latencies, shorter durations or both), and sped up the durations of relative clauses more than those of adjective-noun phrases. The only evidence for disproportional disruption of more complex descriptions by load was a greater increase of production errors for these descriptions than for simpler descriptions under load in Experiments 2 and 4. We thus conclude that syntactic formulation in production (for certain constructions or in certain situations) can proceed with minimal working memory involvement. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

To investigate whether similar control processes are used during single and dual language production, we compared register switching (formal and informal speech in the same language) vs. language switching (French and English). The results across two experiments showed a positive correlation of overall registerand language-switch costs and similar formal French switch costs across the two switching tasks. However, whereas increasing the cue-to-stimulus interval resulted in a reduction of language-switch costs, register-switch costs were unaffected by the interval manipulation. This difference in switch-cost pattern indicates that control processes are not entirely identical during single and dual language production.

A major benefit of computational models is their ability to demonstrate which theoretical assumptions are truly necessary to explain a pattern of data. Dijkstra, Wahl, Buytenhuijs, van Halem, Al-jibouri, de Korte, and Rekké (in press) have impressively shown with Multilink that it is possible to account for a range of findings from bilingual lexical decision, word naming, and forward and backward translation tasks with an integrated lexicon, without lateral connections between translation equivalents, and without inhibition. In this commentary, we consider the applicability of the current model to other multilingual language production tasks, and note where the model's assumptions might need revision as its scope is expanded.