Christian Alberto Navarro-Torres

Princeton University | PU · Department of Psychology

Bilinguals learn to resolve conflict between their two languages and that skill has been hypothesized to create long-term adaptive changes in cognitive functioning. Yet, little is known about how bilinguals recruit cognitive control to enable efficient use of one of their languages, especially in the less skilled and more effortful second language...

Proficient bilinguals use two languages actively, but the contexts in which they do so may differ dramatically. The present study asked what consequences the contexts of language use hold for the way in which cognitive resources modulate language abilities. Three groups of speakers were compared, all of whom were highly proficient Spanish-English b...

An important aim of research on bilingualism is to understand how the brain adapts to the demands of using more than one language. In this paper, we argue that pursuing such an aim entails valuing our research as a discovery process that acts on variety. Prescriptions about sample size and methodology, rightly aimed at establishing a sound basis fo...

What we say generally follows distributional regularities, such as learning to avoid "the asleep dog" because we hear "the dog that's asleep" in its place. However, not everyone follows such regularities. We report data on English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals to examine how working memory mediates variation in a-adjective usage (asle...

The ability to engage in fluent codeswitching is a hallmark of the flexibility and creativity of bilingual language use. Recent discoveries have changed the way we think about codeswitching and its implications for language processing and language control. One is that codeswitching is not haphazard, but subject to unique linguistic and cognitive co...

A goal of early research on language processing was to characterize what is universal about language. Much of the past research focused on native speakers because the native language has been considered as providing privileged truths about acquisition, comprehension, and production. Populations or circumstances that deviated from these idealized no...

The present study examined the role of script in bilingual speech planning by comparing the performance of same and different-script bilinguals. Spanish-English bilinguals (Experiment 1) and Japanese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2) performed a picture-word interference task in which they were asked to name a picture of an object in English, their...

Language production and cognitive control are complex processes that involve distinct yet interacting brain networks. However, the extent to which these processes interact and their neural bases have not been thoroughly examined. Here, we investigated the neural and behavioral bases of language production and cognitive control via a phonological go...

Although variation in the ways individuals process language has long been a topic of interest and discussion in the psycholinguistic literature, only recently have studies of bilingualism and its cognitive consequences begun to reveal the fundamental dynamics between language and cognition. We argue that the active use of two languages provides a l...

Bilingualism is a tool that provides cognitive and language scientists with a means to investigate the interactions between language and cognition that would otherwise be impenetrable in the minds and brains of monolingual speakers. In this chapter we review the highlights of the recent research on the consequences of bilingualism for language proc...

This article is an introduction to the special issue “Translating Research to Practice in the Language Sciences.” The authors state that there are at least two important goals for translational research in the language sciences: ameliorating the deficits arising from atypical development or brain trauma and also promoting positive outcomes for typi...

Background: The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (Sparrow et al., 1984) uses parental report to examine communication and social skills in children with ASDs, and exhibits high reliability when compared with children’s actual pragmatic usage (Reichow et al., 2008). However, specific grammatical items (e.g., wh-questions, tense/aspect, negation) ma...

Background: Children with ASD have been reported to use echolalia, where they imitate others’ utterances without fully understanding their structure or meaning (Gerenser, 2009). To what extent does this or other kinds of imitation help them acquire grammar? Some research has found that children with ASD use more complex negation and question form...