Seventh Heritage Language Research Institute

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Forms of bilingualism: On the consequences of being a heritage speaker for language processing and cognition

Until recently, research on language and its neurocognitive interface focused almost exclusively on monolingual speakers of a single language and typically speakers of English as the native language. In the past two decades, the recognition that more of the world’s speakers are bilingual than monolingual has led to a dramatic increase in research that assumes bilingualism as the norm rather than the exception. This new research investigates the way that bilinguals negotiate the presence of two languages in a single mind and brain.  Despite the recognition that bilingualism is the norm, beyond concerns with age of acquisition and proficiency, very little research on language processing and its neural basis has considered the consequences of the form of bilingualism.  We report a set of studies that compares the performance of Heritage speakers of Spanish with Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals on lexical and sentence processing tasks and on measures of cognitive control that have been shown to be affected by language experience.