Judith Kroll

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of California, Riverside

The goal of this article is to introduce the Collaborative Commentary (CC) tool and explain how it can be used in conjunction with the many TalkBank shared databases to enhance research and teaching in many areas of language study. The CC tool and its features are described in a detailed example of an assignment for an introductory course on langua...

A hallmark of word naming in deep orthographies, effects of spelling-sound regularity and consistency are considered to reach stability in adulthood. We investigated whether these effects were modulated by second language (L2) proficiency in native English and native Spanish speakers. Participants named English, Spanish and language-ambiguous words...

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 most provocative finding about bilingualism in the last two decades is that both languages are active even when bilinguals intend to use one language alone. When bilinguals hear, read, or speak words in one language, form, or translation, relatives of those words in the other language become momentarily available. The way bilingual speakers neg...

We investigated whether fluent language production is associated with greater skill in resolving lexical competition during spoken word recognition and ignoring irrelevant information in non-linguistic tasks. Native English monolinguals and native English L2 learners, who varied on measures of discourse/verbal fluency and cognitive control, identif...

When bilinguals switch languages they regulate the more dominant language to enable spoken production in the less dominant language. How do they engage cognitive control to accomplish regulation? We examined this issue by comparing the consequences of training on language switching in two different contexts. Chinese-English bilinguals were immersed...

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...

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...

We evaluated external and internal sources of variation in second language (L2) and native language (L1) proficiency among college students. One hundred and twelve native-English L2 learners completed measures of L1 and L2 speaking proficiency, working memory and cognitive control and provided self-ratings of language exposure and use. When conside...

In the last two decades there has been an upsurge of research on the cognitive and neural basis of bilingualism. The initial discovery that the bilingual’s two languages are active regardless of the intention to use one language alone, now replicated in hundreds of studies, has shaped the research agenda. The subsequent research has investigated th...

Recent studies have demonstrated variation in language processing for monolingual and bilingual speakers alike, suggesting that only by considering individual differences will an accurate picture of the consequences of language experience be adequately understood. This approach can be illustrated in ERP research that has shown that sentence context...

We investigated whether the features of the second language (L2) matter when we consider the consequence of short-term L2 immersion on performance in the native language (L1). We compared L1 performance in English-speaking learners of a typologically-dissimilar L2-Chinese immersed in Chinese while living in Beijing, China and learners of a typologi...

This study investigated the predictive effects of executive functions on bilingual language control processes. We used a flanker task, a switching task and an n-back task to investigate inhibition, shifting, and updating, respectively. We adopted a cued language switching task to investigate the language control processes during bilingual word prod...

The dynamic nature of the language system enables bilinguals to transfer reading skills and strategies cross-linguistically. For example, reading in the L1 becomes lexically mediated when a new alphabetic language is learned (Nosarti et al., 2009). We examine word reading in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish and English monolinguals to...

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...

Accumulating evidence shows how language context shapes bilingual language use and its cognitive consequences. However, few studies have considered the impact of language context for monolinguals. Although monolinguals' language processing is assumed to be relatively stable and homogeneous, some research has shown novel learning through exposure al...

When deaf bilinguals are asked to make semantic similarity judgments of two written words, their responses are influenced by the sublexical relationship of the signed language translations of the target words. This study investigated whether the observed effects of American Sign Language (ASL) activation on English print depend on (a) an overlap in...

The use of two languages is common, but the circumstances that give rise to bilingualism are diverse. Recent discussions about the consequences of bilingualism have focused on how variation in language experience and use may differentially shape the engagement of cognitive control. In this paper, we illustrate the role of language variation in the...

We examine word reading in English-dominant heritage speakers of Spanish and English monolingual controls to investigate whether the ability to speak (but not read) a language with a shallow orthography increases the preference for regular spelling-sound mappings in a deep orthography (i.e., English). Participants varied on measures of language pro...

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...

Bilingualism is a complex life experience. Second language (L2) learning and bilingualism take place in many different contexts. To develop a comprehensive account of dual-language experience requires research that examines individuals who are learning and using two languages in both the first language (L1) and second language (L2) environments. In...

Bilingualism imposes costs to language processing but benefits to word learning. We test a new hypothesis that relates costs in language processing at study to benefits in learning at test as desirable difficulties. While previous studies have taught vocabulary via bilinguals’ native language (L1), recent evidence suggests that bilinguals acquire r...

Bilinguals activate both languages when they intend to speak even one language alone (e.g., Kroll, Bobb, & Wodniekca, 2006). At the same time, they are able to select the language they intend to speak and switch back and forth between languages rapidly, with few production errors. Previous research utilizing behavioral (Linck, Kroll, & Sunderman, 2...

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...

Aims Previous research has indicated that young adults form predictions for the meaning of upcoming words when contexts are highly constrained. This can lead to processing benefits when expectations are met, but also costs, as indicated by a late, frontally distributed and positive event-related potential (ERP), when an unexpected word is encounter...

In this chapter, we view the recent evidence on the bilingual lexicon that points to a dynamic view of lexical processes. In contrast to earlier assumptions that words in the bilingual's two languages were represented and processed independently, the findings of studies with both adults and children demonstrate that words in both languages are acti...

Morphological brain changes as a consequence of new learning have been widely established. Learning a second language (L2) is one such experience that can lead to rapid structural neural changes. However, still relatively little is known about how levels of proficiency in the L2 and the age at which the L2 is learned influence brain neuroplasticity...

Infants are exposed to the language of the environment in which they are born and, in most instances, become native speakers of that language. Although the history of research on language acquisition provides a colorful debate on the specific ways that nature and nurture shape this process (e.g., MacWhinney, 1999; Pinker, 1995), its primary focus h...

Recent years have seen increasing interest in research on bilingualism and second language learning. These studies of bilinguals have revealed aspects of the human mind that are otherwise inaccessible by focusing on monolinguals alone. In this chapter we review the recent behavioral and neurocognitive evidence on how second language (L2) learners a...

The study of emoticon use in text communication is in its early stages (Aragon, Feldman, Chen & Kroll, 2014), with even less known about how emoticons function in multilingual environments. We describe a preliminary longitudinal analysis of text communication in an online bilingual scientific work environment and demonstrate how patterns of emotico...

A seemingly stable system, the native language, is susceptible to change in the early stages of second language (L2) learning. Reported across language domains (Bice & Kroll, 2015; Chang, 2012; 2013; Marian et al., 2003; Nosarti et al., 2010), changes to native language performance are characterized by a processing cost that slows down first langua...

In the past two decades, new research on multilingualism has changed our understanding of the consequences of learning and using two or more languages for cognition, for the brain, and for success and well-being across the entire lifespan. Far from the stereotype that exposure to multiple languages in infancy complicates language and cognitive deve...

We draw parallels between emoticons in textual communication and gesture in signed language with respect to the interdependence of codes by describing two contexts under which the behavior of emoticons in textual communication resembles that of gesture in speech. Generalizing from those findings, we propose that gesture is likely characterized by a...

In two self-paced reading experiments we asked whether late, highly proficient, English–Spanish bilinguals are able to process language-specific morpho-syntactic information in their second language (L2). The processing of Spanish clitic pronouns’ word order was tested in two sentential constructions. Experiment 1 showed that English–Spanish biling...

What is the time course of cross-language activation in deaf sign–print bilinguals? Prior studies demonstrating cross-language activation in deaf bilinguals used paradigms that would allow strategic or conscious translation. This study investigates whether cross-language activation can be eliminated by reducing the time available for lexical proces...

According to the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), second language (L2) learners initially access the meaning of L2 words via the L1 whereas advanced learners access meaning directly. We tested this hypothesis with English learners of Spanish in a translation recognition task, in which participants were asked to judge whether Engl...

We evaluated the impact of second language (L2-Spanish) proficiency on spoken and visual word recognition in the first language (L1-English). English learners of Spanish (N=24) who were immersed in an English-speaking environment and varied on multiple indices of Spanish proficiency identified spoken English words presented in noise that varied in...

We evaluated whether proficiency in a language with a shallow orthography (i.e., Spanish) changes the degree of transparency in spelling-sound mappings expected in a deep orthography (i.e., English). English-Spanish (N=26) and Spanish-English (N=24) bilinguals and English monolingual controls (N=19) named regular/consistent (e.g., GATE) and irregul...

Three groups of native English speakers named words aloud in Spanish, their second language (L2). Intermediate proficiency learners in a classroom setting (Experiment 1) and in a domestic immersion program (Experiment 2) were compared to a group of highly proficient English–Spanish speakers. All three groups named cognate words more quickly and acc...

We exploit the unique phonetic properties of bilingual speech to ask how processes occurring during planning affect speech articulation, and whether listeners can use the phonetic modulations that occur in anticipation of a codeswitch to help restrict their lexical search to the appropriate language. An analysis of spontaneous bilingual codeswitchi...

Research on proficient bilinguals has demonstrated that both languages are always active, even when only one is required. The coactivation of the two languages creates both competition and convergence, facilitating the processing of cognate words, but slowing lexical access when there is a requirement to engage control mechanisms to select the targ...

Emoticons in informal text communication are common worldwide. They have the potential to reveal emotion and social functions, analogous to facial expression and body gestures in face-to-face verbal communication. Our findings from a corpus study of online text communication by a group of scientists, some of whom were bilingual and others monolingu...

In the recent swell of research on bilingualism and its consequences for the mind and the brain, there has been a warning that we need to remember that not all bilinguals are the same (e.g., Green & Abutalebi, 2013; Kroll & Bialystok, 2013; Luk & Bialystok, 2013). There are bilinguals who acquired two languages in early childhood and have used them...

In this article we discuss the role of desirable difficulties in vocabulary learning from two perspectives, one having to do with identifying conditions of learning that impose initial challenges to the learner but then benefit later retention and transfer, and the other having to do with the role of certain difficulties that are intrinsic to langu...

Socio-emotional communication is a critical determining factor in the cohesiveness of international work teams. In recent years, online text communication (e.g., chat, forums, email) has been widely used in cross-cultural collaborations, and emoticons are often viewed as socio-emotional cues in this type of communication. Therefore, it is important...

In the last two decades there has been an explosion of research on bilingualism and its consequences for the mind and the brain (e.g., Kroll & Bialystok, 2013). One reason is that the use of two or more languages reveals interactions across cognitive and neural systems that are often obscured in monolingual speakers of a single language (e.g., Krol...

We tested the predictions of the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) to examine how children map novel words to concepts during early stages of L2 learning. Fifth grade Dutch L2 learners with 8 months of English instruction performed a translation recognition task followed by translation production in both directions. The children we...

In the last two decades, there has been an upsurge of research on bilingualism recognizing that bilinguals may be more representative language users than their monolingual peers (e.g., Kroll, Dussias, Bogulski, & Valdes Kroff, 2012). The excitement about bilinguals is related not only to their neglected status in the past literature but also to a s...

The present study asked whether or not the apparent insensitivity of second language (L2) learners to grammatical gender violations reflects an inability to use grammatical information during L2 lexical processing. Native German speakers and English speakers with intermediate to advanced L2 proficiency in German performed a translation-recognition...

Research Question: Do bilingual users search for common ground with monolingual users in online text communication? • We examined 4 years of online text communication among a stable group of adult scientists as they coordinated telescope observation via chat. • American scientists communicated in their first language (L1) and French scientists comm...

A series of discoveries in the last two decades has changed the way we think about bilingualism and its implications for language and cognition. One is that both languages are always active. The parallel activation of the two languages is thought to give rise to competition that imposes demands on the bilingual to control the language not in use to...

Recent evidence demonstrates that American Sign Language (ASL) signs are active during print word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are highly proficient in both ASL and English. In the present study, we investigate whether signs are active during print word recognition in two groups of unbalanced bilinguals: deaf ASL-dominant and hearing English-...

Recent evidence demonstrates that American Sign Language (ASL) signs are active during print word recognition in deaf bilinguals who are highly proficient in both ASL and English. In the present study, we investigate whether signs are active during print word recognition in two groups of unbalanced bilinguals: deaf ASL-dominant and hearing English-...

Most of the recent research on online text communication has been conducted in social contexts with diverse groups of users. Here we examine a stable group of adult scientists as they chat about their work. Some scientists communicated in their first language (L1) and others communicated either in their L1 or in a second (L2) language. We analyze t...

The use of two or more languages is common in most of the world. Yet, until recently, bilingualism was considered to be a complicating factor for language processing, cognition, and the brain. The past 20 years have witnessed an upsurge of research on bilingualism to examine language acquisition and processing, their cognitive and neural bases, and...

The current special issue presents the state of the art on the topics of both bilingual language control and executive function, with a particular focus on how bilingualism and cognitive control interact. The contributions to this issue investigate the mechanisms that allow bilinguals to regulate their languages and address how different aspects of...

Contemporary research on bilingualism has been framed by two major discoveries. In the realm of language processing, studies of comprehension and production show that bilinguals activate information about both languages when using one language alone. Parallel activation of the two languages has been demonstrated for highly proficient bilinguals as...

Repetition priming was used to assess how proficiency and the ease or difficulty of lexical access influence bilingual translation. Two experiments, conducted at different universities with different Spanish-English bilingual populations and materials, showed repetition priming in word translation for same-direction and different-direction repetiti...

We report two experiments that investigate the effects of sentence context on bilingual lexical access in Spanish and English. Highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences in Spanish and English that included a marked word to be named. The word was either a cognate with similar orthography and/or phonology in the two languages, or a...

We investigated the influence of word class and translation ambiguity on cross-linguistic representation and processing. Bilingual speakers of English and Spanish performed translation production and translation recognition tasks on nouns and verbs in both languages. Words either had a single translation or more than one translation. Translation pr...

Recent studies have shown that when bilinguals or multilinguals read written words, listen to spoken words, or plan words that they intend to speak in one language alone, information in all of the languages that they know is momentarily active. That activation produces cross-language competition that sometimes converges to facilitate performance an...

Experimental approaches to bilingualism and multilingualism have developed at a rapid pace in the past 20 years (e.g., Kroll & De Groot, 2005).Keywords:bilingualism;methods;neurolinguistics;psycholinguistics;second language acquisition;multilingualism

OverviewBilingual Speech PlanningActivation of the L1 Translation EquivalentThe Cognitive Consequences of BilingualismConclusion References

Behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measures are reported for a study in which relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals named identical pictures in each of their two languages. Production occurred only in Chinese (the first language, L1) or only in English (the second language, L2) in a given block with the order counterbalanced ac...

In 2 experiments, relatively proficient Chinese-English bilinguals decided whether Chinese words were the correct translations of English words. Critical trials were those on which incorrect translations were related in lexical form or meaning to the correct translation. In Experiment 1, behavioral interference was revealed for both distractor type...

Recent psycholinguistic research demonstrates that using a second language has consequences for the first language (e.g. Dussias, 2003; Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002) and for domain-general cognitive processes (Bialystok, 2005). This work suggests that the language system is permeable, with cross-language exchange at every level of processing (Malt & S...

Psycholinguistics has traditionally focused on language processing in monolingual speakers. In the past two decades, there has been a dramatic increase of research on bilingual speakers, recognizing that bilingualism is not an unusual or problematic circumstance but one that characterizes more language speakers in the world than monolingualism. Mos...

The current study examined the neural correlates associated with local and global inhibitory processes used by bilinguals to resolve interference between competing responses. Two groups of participants completed both blocked and mixed picture naming tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). One group first named a set of...

Although proficient bilinguals are able to speak fluently in each of their two languages, recent studies suggest that both languages are continually active, to the point where the unintended language is often on the tip of the speaker’s tongue. In this talk, I describe recent evidence on bilingual speech planning that suggests that alternatives in...

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word...

Brysbaert and Duyck (2009) suggest that it is time to abandon the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994) in favor of connectionist models such as BIA+ (Dijkstra and Van Heuven, 2002) that more accurately account for the recent evidence on nonselective access in bilingual word recognition. In this brief response, we first review the hi...

Subject-verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examined the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual number...

Adults are notoriously poor second-language (L2) learners. A context that enables successful L2 acquisition is language immersion. In this study, we investigated the effects of immersion learning for a group of university students studying abroad in Spain. Our interest was in the effect of immersion on the native language (L1), English. We tested t...

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Until recently, cognitive science virtually ignored the fact that most people of the world are bilingual. During the past ten years this situation has changed markedly. There is now an appreciation that learning and using more than one language is the more natural circumstance of cognition. As a result, there is a wealth of new research on second-l...

Some second language (L2) learners return from study abroad experiences with seemingly no change in their L2 ability. In this study we investigate whether a certain level of internal cognitive resources is necessary in order for individuals to take full advantage of the study abroad experience. Specifically, we examined the role of working memory r...

Many recent studies demonstrate that both languages are active when bilinguals and second language (L2) learners are reading, listening, or speaking one language only. The parallel activity of the two languages has been hypothesized to create competition that must be resolved. Models of bilingual lexical access have proposed an inhibitory control m...

Recent psycholinguistic studies provide compelling evidence for the claim that both languages are active when second language (L2) learners and bilinguals process information in one language alone. The parallel activation of the two languages occurs even when individuals are performing highly practiced tasks such as reading, listening, and speaking...

Although bilinguals rarely make random errors of language when they speak, research on spoken production provides compelling evidence to suggest that both languages are active when only one language is spoken (e.g., [Poulisse, N. (1999). Slips of the tongue: Speech errors in first and second language production. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjami...