Bilingual chlidren, as well as older adults, exhibit advantages over their monolingul peers in tasks that rely on executive control. However, until recently, studies comparing bilingual and monolingual college students found mixed results, and a less consistent bilingual advantage. Most studies examining this population have used tasks that rely on spatial visual attention, such as variations of the Simon task, the ANT task and the anti-saccade task. In this talk, I will describe a new study that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual college students on three executive control tasks, and investigated possible bilingual advantages beyond the domain of spatial attention. Possible implications of the results for the locus of the bilingual executive advantage will be explored.

Words provide the central interface between form and meaning during language comprehension. Describing the nature of form-meaning interactions at the level of individual words is therefore one of the major goals of contemporary research on language comprehension. Part of that general endeavor involves describing exactly when semantic information becomes available during visual word recognition, and the nature of the form-level processing that is necessary for that to occur. I'd like to present some elements of response to these specific questions as well as address the question of the interrelation of the two languages of language learners at the word level. I will present a study using event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the time-course of visual word recognition in second language learners using a masked repetition priming paradigm as well as other data from bilingual studies run in our lab that may shed light on these topics.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often show an uneven profile within the area of morphosyntax. For example, in English, the use of tense/agreement morphemes stands out as an area of special weakness. In Swedish, both word order and the use of tense can be problematic. These weaknesses are resolved only gradually. Thus far, the theoretical frameworks that might account for the findings constitute only partial solutions. Some provide a very insightful description of the difficulty but do not explain the systematic, incremental changes seen over time; others provide a plausible account of the gradual change but lack the precision necessary to explain the differences across languages. An alternative view that incorporates the empirically supported claims of the previous approaches will be offered. The alternative assumes that many of the characteristics of the SLI profile, including crosslinguistic differences in the profile, can be traced to details in the input, and that children's ability to interpret successively larger grammatical units in input sentences can lead to the gradual, incremental changes seen in the children's morphosyntactic use. Observations supporting these assumptions will be provided, and their theoretical as well as clinical implications will be discussed.

Speech communication involves a chain of events that ideally aligns mental representations in the talker with those in the listener. Links in the chain can be "broken" at many points, particularly in cases where the talker and listener approach each other with non-optimally aligned linguistic sound systems (e.g. when they do not come from the same native language background) or when the listener's access to the speech signal may be blocked by a hearing impairment or the presence of background noise. I will present a series of studies that aimed to understand how talkers and listeners repair these breakdowns in order to achieve talker-listener alignment. The first study examined talker adaptation to the listener. Specifically, we conducted a series of acoustic-phonetic comparisons of "clear speech" across languages with various phonological structures. A second study focused on the other side of the talker-listener channel by examining listener adaptation to the talker. In particular, we investigated listener adaptation to foreign-accented speech. Both of these studies examined talker-listener adaptation under laboratory conditions in which the talker and listener did not interact directly. A third study examined talker-listener interactions under more natural conditions of spontaneous, dialogue recordings. In this study we examined communicative efficiency and phonetic convergence in English conversations between pairs of native English talkers and in conversations between one native and one non-native talker of English. Together, these studies build a picture of speech communication as a bidirectional process of talker-listener alignment even in the case of communication between interlocutors who do not share a "mother tongue."