John W. Schwieter

Domain-general conflict control refers to the cognitive process in which individuals suppress task-irrelevant information and extract task-relevant information. It supports both effective implementation of cognitive conflict control and emotional conflict control. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and adopted a...

When bilinguals switch between their two languages, they often alternate between words whose formation rules in one language are different from the other (e.g., a noun-verb compound in one language may be a verb-noun compound in another language). In this study, we analyze behavioral performance and electrophysiological activity to examine the effe...

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Bilingualism presents an introduction to the neural bases and cognitive processes of the bilingual brain. It covers foundational knowledge required for study in the area of bilingualism, including prominent theories and research methodologies, and the state of research in relevant fields of psycholinguistics, cognitive...

In real-life communication, individuals use language that carries evident rewarding and punishing elements, such as praise and criticism. A common trend is to seek more praise while avoiding criticism. Furthermore, semantics is crucial for conveying information, but such semantic access to native and foreign languages is subtly distinct. To investi...

Sleep-dependent consolidation is important for novel word learning, but previous studies have neglected the potential modulating role of learning environments. The present study examines sleep-dependent consolidation effects by comparing learning in a virtual reality (VR) environment and in a traditional picture-word (PW) environment. Two groups of...

The present study uses functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) to examine the overlapping and specific neural correlates of contextualized emotional conflict control and domain-general conflict control. During a performance on emotional and domain-general conflict tasks, conjunction analyses showed that neural areas distributed in the frontopari...

For multilinguals, acquiring and processing language is similar to other cognitive skills: they are grounded in mechanisms of sensory processing and motor control (Paradis, 2019). Recent clinical and experimental research on multilingualism have introduced innovative neuroimaging measures and psychological methods that have significantly shed light...

In this behavioral and electrophysiological study, we compare novel word learning, particularly lexical form acquisition, in an immersive virtual reality (VR) context with a picture-word (PW) association context. We also test whether inhibitory control and age of second language acquisition (L2 AoA) have modulating effects. Chinese speakers of L2 E...

Studies have shown that there are overlapping neural bases for cognitive and affective conflict control, but whether the neural activity patterns caused by the two types of conflict are similar remains to be explored. The present study utilizes electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to temporally and spatially a...

The relationship between language switching and task switching has been well studied in bilingualism literature. This study employs two novel experiments involving magnitude-parity switching and transparency-orientation switching and examines the costs associated with these task switches compared to language switching. Switching costs and the reduc...

Aims: Cross-language interference studies of language control mainly focus on the lexical level, whereas language control may occur at the smallest unit phonemic level of language. In the present study, we examined the role of language control during cross-language phoneme processing. Design: Participants used one language to name pinyin or alphabe...

In this paper, we examine the effects of learning environment on second language (L2) gender agreement. English speakers learning L2 Spanish participated in a self-paced reading task and a picture selection task prior to and after a short-term study abroad experience. The results from the self-paced reading task showed that their reliance on the ma...

Previous studies have debated whether the ability for bilinguals to mentally control their languages is a consequence of their experiences switching between languages or whether it is a specific, yet highly-adaptive, cognitive ability. The current study investigates how variations in the language-related gene FOXP2 and executive function-related ge...

Self‐positivity bias is a common psychological phenomenon in which individuals often associate positive information with themselves. However, little is known about how self‐positivity bias is modulated by different language contexts (e.g., a first vs. second language). To this end, we analyzed behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine whe...

Human communication not only involves the need to switch between the modalities of speaking and listening, but for bilinguals, it can also involve switching between languages. It is unknown as to whether modality and language switching share underlying control mechanisms or whether one type of switching affects control processes involved in the oth...

Research has shown that several variables affect language control among bilingual speakers but the effect of affective processing remains unexplored. Chinese–English bilinguals participated in a novel prime-target language switching experiment in which they first judged the affective valence (i.e., positive or negative) of auditorily presented word...

Unlabelled: Bilingual adaptive control mechanisms appear to be linked to congenital genetic factors such as dopamine (DA) genes. However, it is unclear as to whether acquired cognitive exercise can vanquish innate influences that allow bilingual executive advantages to be shown in other cognitive areas. In the present study, we examine the relatio...

For bilinguals, speaking and listening are assisted by complex control processes including conf lict monitoring and inhibition. However, the extent to which these processes adapt to linguistic and situational needs has been examined separately for language production and comprehension. In the present study, we use a dual-EEG to record the carry-ove...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The Culture and Second Language Learning in Migrants Research Topic contributed towards our understanding of how culture is an integral component of second language learning, acquisition, and performance. Across articles, numerous sophisticated and rigorous methodologies were used to answer very diverse sets of research questions. Together, this co...

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in...

According to George Miller (1956), a pioneer of the ‘cognitive revolution’ and proponent of the buzzword concept of the “magical number seven,” cognitive science in the modern sense had only started in the 1950s and gradually took shape in the mid-1970s. Based on Miller’s (2003) historical account, cognitive science as a scientific field of study w...

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision-making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in...

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between working memory (WM) and grammar development across adult L2 learning. For over twenty years, WM has received considerable attention in research on adult second language (L2) development. One reason for this is that L2 learning requires both processing and storage to comprehend input and to extr...

The capacity for temporary storage and manipulation of information, i.e., working memory (WM), was first reported to be related to vocabulary acquisition over 30 years ago (Daneman & Green, 1986, for general WM capacity; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989 and Service, 1989, for phonological WM). Although a relationship with L2 vocabulary knowledge has bee...

This chapter presents the hypothesis that working memory and language evolved in tandem. It reviews the evolutionary origins of each of the components of Baddeley’s working memory model and their role in the evolution of language. The chapter reviews the gradualist position that language did evolve slowly from aurally directed early primate calls a...

The phonological component of the working memory system is specialized in maintaining a sequence of verbal items (digits, letters, words, pseudowords) over a very short period of time. Therefore, a central issue has been why we are provided with such ability, and what is its functional role. A series of studies on healthy people, on children learni...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The last 50 years have witnessed an exponential growth and significant progress in working memory and language sciences research independently and jointly, though a generalizable theory or model that transcends disciplines is still absent from the literature. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from cognitive science and emerging patterns from la...

The multicomponent model of working memory developed during the period when psycholinguistics was dominated by Chomsky’s transformational grammar and its potential implications. The original model had assumed a limited capacity attentional control system, the central executive, aided by temporary verbal storage from the phonological loop and visuos...

This chapter examines variation patterns across the world's grammars in relation to working memory (WM) models in psycholinguistics. It distinguishes: (1) constrained capacity proposals in which certain limits in WM are used to explain why some grammatical phenomena are (or are supposed to be) nonoccurring; (2) more versus less WM proposals where g...

Working memory based limitations have increasingly been proposed as a way of explaining differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing. However, while there has been increasing interest in the role that working memory may play in L2 sentence processing, different approaches to L2 processing rely on different conceptualisati...

This chapter focuses on how working memory develops in children who are born deaf. It includes studies of deaf users of spoken and signed languages from within the medical and social models of deafness. It also reviews how differences in working memory capacity have been explained between deaf and hearing children. It reviews the role of auditory f...

Several children in a typical classroom experience persistent learning difficulties that are likely to reflect weak cognitive skills (Holmes et al., 2020). In some cases, these are related to poor working memory. In this chapter, we discuss how limited working memory resources constrain classroom learning, focusing on the impact of poor working mem...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show significant difficulties mastering language yet exhibit normal-range nonverbal intelligence, normal hearing and speech, and no neurological impairment. Deficits in sentence comprehension represent a major feature of school-age children’s language profile. So do memory limitations, including d...

This chapter reviews research on the efficacy of training Working Memory (WM) in an educational context. We begin with a brief description of WM, its relation to classroom constructs, an overview of WM training programs, followed by classroom recommendations pertaining to several case studies. We characterize WM training programs into two categorie...

Working Memory (WM) is a central structure maintaining information at short term in face of temporal decay and interference for its processing in ongoing tasks. As a consequence, WM is strongly involved in learning, especially in learning first or second languages. The Time-Based Resource Sharing (TBRS) model describes the functioning and developme...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory (WM) deficits are fundamental problems of children with average intelligence but with specific learning disorders in reading and/or math. Depending on the task, these deficits manifest themselves as a domain-specific storage constraint (i.e., the inefficient accessing and availability of phonological representations, e.g., numbers, p...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory’s limited capacity places significant constraints on people's ability to hold information while processing. However, skilled readers are able to effectively encode important information into long-term memory during comprehension. This chapter describes the long-term working memory theory (LT-WM), originally developed to explain how e...

According to some researchers, different languages foster specific habits of processing information, which may be retained beyond the linguistic domain. In left-branching languages, for instance, the head is usually preceded by its dependents, and real-time sentence comprehension may require a different allocation of attention as compared to right-...

To conceptualize the communicative role of working memory (WM), the Ease-of-Language Understanding (ELU) model was proposed (e.g., Rönnberg, 2003; Rönnberg et al., 2008, 2013, 2019, 2020). The model states that ease of language understanding is determined by the speed and accuracy with which the signal is matched to existing multimodal language rep...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second language (L2) reading comprehension has received considerable attention for nearly three decades. Although studies in this line of research generally report a small to moderate relationship between WM and L2 reading comprehension, comparison of studies remains challenging due to the lack of sp...

We view working memory as a general resource in which attention can be allocated to any type of information and stimulus input. One vital skill that requires the use of working memory is the comprehension and production of language. In this chapter, we outline the basis of the embedded-processes model of working memory. We then discuss how the diff...

This chapter addresses the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language production and comprehension, focusing on data from brain-damaged individuals, while also drawing on related findings from healthy adults. The perspective on WM is the domain-specific model which includes WM buffers that are specific to phonological and semantic information a...

Cognitive load theory is an instructional theory based on our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human cognitive architecture. It can be used to provide instructional guidelines for the acquisition of all aspects of a second language by adults and some aspects, primarily reading and writing, of a first language by both children and adults. Th...

Working memory and language are tightly intertwined cognitive systems. Working memory enables language acquisition and vocabulary expansion; it supports both language comprehension and language production. Language, on the other hand, provides key representations that support efficient and robust encoding and maintenance of information in working m...

Many general linguistic theories and language processing frameworks have assumed that language processing is largely a chunking procedure and that it is underpinned and constrained by our memory limitations. Despite this general consensus, the distinction between short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) limitations as they relate to language...

Working memory (WM) training explores whether and how repeated practice on working memory tasks might generalize to a variety of outcome measures. Although this field of research is part of the growing literature in cognitive sciences, it has spawned contentious debates. The controversies are largely driven by inconsistent findings and commercial i...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Research on working memory and language has followed two quite divergent paths. The first line of inquiry examines questions relating to the components and organization of working memory – whether there are specialized buffers, the nature of the link to long-term memory, and so on. For the most part, studies of this type have little to say about th...

This chapter starts by providing brief accounts of both first and second language speaking, and then surveys empirical work, measurement issues, and theory on the use of second language speaking tasks – the sort of tasks, often with real-world connections, used in communicative language classrooms to nurture second language development and performa...

The role of working memory in language learning has received considerable attention, but several pertinent issues remain. One of these concerns the directionality of the relationships between working memory and language learning. Another issue relates to different types of processing and working memory components involved in learning different aspe...

Working memory, as a cognitive function, needs to be understood within the context of the mind as a whole, in other words within a general framework that can connect it to related research and theory. In this chapter we present one such broad view of the mind, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), and apply it to the study of working memory, empha...

Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, a vast body of research has examined the role of working memory (WM) in second-language (L2) development, processing, and use (e.g., Linck et al., 2014). Our ability to discern such relationships, however, may be obscured by the different measures of WM that are adopted and employed by L2 researchers. Ther...

We start with a brief review of evidence that verbal working memory (WM) involves a limited capacity phonological loop capable of retaining verbal sequences for a few seconds in immediate serial recall, vocabulary acquisition, speech production, and language comprehension. The challenge of explaining how such a system handles information about seri...

A distinguishing feature of the cognitive process of speech planning is its flexible balancing of speed, quality, and effort. Utterance planning strategies can vary adaptively depending on speaker goals and circumstances. For example, when speed is a priority, the planning process might sacrifice the quality of an utterance by engaging in more incr...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory is a complex construct and neurological function that includes short-term auditory and visual-spatial storage, information processing, and executive awareness and regulation. An in-depth assessment of working memory should test these diverse components with contemporary standardized measures. Informal procedures, such as interviews a...

The construction of a coherent text mental representation demands multiple comprehension processes such as the activation and maintenance of the most important ideas of the text, the retrieval of related information from long-term memory, the generation of information that has not been explicitly mentioned (e.g., inference making), the detection of...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The present study measured event-related potentials (ERP) and behavioral performance to examine whether inhibitory control is involved in voluntary language switching, and if so, to explore the differences in inhibitory control between voluntary and mandatory language switching. Unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals completed two picture naming tas...

The extent to which bilingual language control (BLC) is related to domain-general executive control (EC) remains unclear. The present study applied activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to identify commonalities and distinctions in the brain regions across domains reported in neuroimaging studies. We specifically compare results from...

A growing body of research suggests that the language in which bilinguals make decisions affects the rationality of such decisions. Furthermore, bilinguals constantly confront cross‐language interference that requires complex language control processes to resolve this competition. However, the relationship between language control and decision‐maki...

In this study, we investigated the cognitive-emotional interplay by measuring the effects of executive competition (Pessoa, 2013), i.e., how inhibitory control is influenced when emotional information is encountered. Sixty-three children (8 to 9 years of age) participated in an inhibition task (central task) accompanied by happy, sad, or neutral em...

The present study examined how decision-making is affected by first (L1) and second languages (L2), emotion, and cognitive load. In a cross-task study, 30 Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to implement lexical-semantic judgement and gambling task. The results showed that after lexical decisions under high cognitive load, P3 was more positive fo...

DescriptionContentsResourcesCoursesAbout the Authors Table of Contents 1. Working memory and language: an overview of key topics Part I. Introduction: 2. Working memory and the challenge of language Part II. Theoretical Models and Measures: 3. The evolution of working memory and language 4. The phonological loop as a 'language learning device': an...

Recently in translation studies, important advances have been made with respect to directionality (i.e., whether translation is done into one's native or non-native language). What was once considered the "elephant in the room, " directionality now has a growing number of empirical studies that analyze factors which contribute differentially to tra...

Previous research has explored the relationship between language control and executive control based on performance in bilinguals' skilled languages. However, this relationship between bilingualism and executive control has not been examined at the very initial stage of language learning. In the present study, we trained Chinese speakers to learn w...

Objectives Research on second language (L2) sentence comprehension often has examined reliance on semantic and syntactic information but has left aside for the most part the role of prosodic cues. In the present study, we compare less- and more-proficient L2 learners’ integration of prosody and syntax structure during auditory L2 sentence comprehen...

The present study examines the language- and culture-learning perceptions of domestic and international students from a Canadian university who participated in an intensive four-week-long Spanish language and cultural immersion program in Spain. The study draws on quantitative and qualitative data to explore the ways in which the participants’ prev...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

Everything we do involves language. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book offers students a contemporary introduction to the study of language. Each thought-provoking chapter is accessible to readers from a variety of fields, and is helpfully organized across six parts: sound; structure and meaning; language typologies and change; language and soc...

This article discusses research in the field of bilingualism that has the potential to inform the related, albeit disconnected, field of Cognitive Translation and Interpreting Studies (CTIS). It reviews issues such as lexical access and the multilingual mental lexicon, inhibitory control and the "bilingual advantage debate". This debate refers to t...

Key Questions in Second Language Acquisition: An Introduction by B. VanPatten, M. Smith and A. Benati (2020) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xvi + 212pp.

For bilinguals, research suggests that both languages are constantly active and competing in the mind, even when only using one. However, this body of work has reported inconclusive results on the long-term effects of the constant parallel activation and use of more than one language on the brain. This has mostly been due to inconsistent comparison...

Studies of bilingual speech production suggest that different executive functions (EFs) contribute to the cognitive control of language production. However, no study has simultaneously examined the relationship between different EFs and language control during online speech production. The current study examined individual differences in three EFs...

For second language learners, an international experience can have positive effects on language learning and intercultural development even when participating in a program of relatively short duration. One issue which has not yet received attention is the potential impact that the study abroad experience may have on social participation and positio...

Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - edited by Roberto R. Heredia January 2020