Psycholinguistics 1

Abstract

This chapter considers the critical features of language processing for healthy young adults who actively use two languages. It focuses on data from studies that use a wide range of methods, including measures of brain activity. The chapter also considers some of the broader implications of what the authors have discussed for language use across the lifespan and for both healthy individuals and for those facing pathology. A primary goal of psycholinguistics is to characterize variation in language experience to better understand how linguistic experiences shape both linguistic and cognitive processing. One of the most important discoveries about bilingualism is that bilinguals’ two languages are active and competing even when bilinguals are only speaking or listening to one of their languages. One manipulation that has been widely used to index language co-activation is using words with cross-language overlap, such as cognates, or translation equivalent words that have similar phonological and/or orthographic forms across languages.