Aug 2026· Academia Neuroscience and Brain Research· Vol 2· 0 citations· 23 references
Abstract
Introduction: Multilingual speakers frequently report that operating in a different language involves more than a change in grammatical system. The phenomenon at issue is linguistic frame switching (LFS): the involuntary reorganisation of cognitive, emotional, and identity-relevant schemas when a multilingual speaker moves between languages. This study investigated whether German–English bilinguals exhibit systematic language-dependent differences in self-perception and narrative content.
Materials and methods: This report presents findings from an original mixed-methods study of 27 German–English bi- and multilinguals, combining self-report questionnaire data with computational text analysis (linguistic inquiry and word count, LIWC) of matched narrative pairs elicited by identical picture prompts in both languages at a six-week interval.
Results: Approximately 78% of the participants reported feeling distinctly different when using their respective languages (21 of 27; χ2(1) = 8.33, p = 0.004). LIWC analysis revealed systematic cross-linguistic divergences: German narratives were consistently richer in cognitive processing, occupation-related content, and achievement themes; English narratives were higher in social process language. At the individual level, the contrasts were sometimes dramatic—the same person, the same picture, but two narratives that read as if written by different authors.
Conclusions: It is argued that these patterns cannot be explained by code-switching or translation equivalence effects alone. LFS, the present report suggests, has largely untapped implications for how neuroscience conceptualises the brain–mind–environment relationship. These findings are exploratory and subject to important limitations: the sample was small (N = 27) and self-selected, language proficiency was self-rated rather than objectively measured, and no monolingual control group was included.
This study examines linguistic interference from Spanish to French in the written productions of fifth-semester students enrolled in the Foreign Languages Program at the University of Cartagena. The research aimed to identify and categorize the most common instances of cross-linguistic influence present in learners' written responses. A mixed-methods design with a qualitative emphasis was adopted. Data were collected through a structured written production test consisting of guided writing tasks, sentence translation, sentence ordering, and interpretation activities. The analysis focused on identifying and classifying instances of interference according to four linguistic domains: morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. The findings revealed that morphological interference was the most frequent category, particularly in orthography, grammatical gender, and lexical borrowing. Syntactic and semantic interferences were also recurrent, while pragmatic interference appeared less frequently. The results suggest that the typological proximity between Spanish and French facilitates learning while simultaneously generating transfer-related difficulties. The study highlights the importance of explicitly addressing differences between language during instruction in order to create linguistic awareness and to reduce negative transfer and improve learners' written production.
Gabriel Sabatini Tamayo, Liz Chaireth De Avila Pacheco, Camilo Andrés Camilo Andrés· International Journal of Lan...· 0 citations
This study investigates the neural processing of grammatical gender incongruencies in German in Turkish-German bilinguals using event-related potentials (ERPs) using a connected speech paradigm, taking into account the potential influence of the absence of grammatical gender in their first language (L1; Turkish) on this process. Participants listened to short stories in German that introduced a person or an inanimate object as a referent, followed later by a gendered pronoun that was either congruent or incongruent with the referent's grammatical gender. For bilingual participants, half of the trials were presented entirely in German, and the other half included a language switch whereby: the first part including the referent was presented in Turkish, while the second part including the critical pronoun was in German. German monolinguals served as a control group and listened to the same stories entirely in German. ERP results revealed a robust P600 effect in monolinguals for gender incongruencies both in conditions involving personal and inanimate referents. Bilinguals exhibited a P600 effect only for personal referents in non-switch trials, indicating sensitivity to semantically grounded gender but reduced responsiveness to purely syntactic gender incongruencies. No P600 effect was observed in switch trials, suggesting cross-linguistic interference from Turkish in processing gender information in German. These findings highlight that bilinguals' L1 continues to influence second language (L2) processing, even in early, highly proficient speakers. While monolinguals processed syntactic gender with and without semantic cues similarly, bilinguals relied more on semantic information. Language switching further influenced processing, demonstrating the dynamic effects of cross-linguistic interference. This study underscores the interplay between structural linguistic differences in bilinguals and offers insights into the cognitive and neural mechanisms of bilingual language adaptation. It advances understanding of how bilinguals process gender incongruencies in structurally distinct languages, emphasizing the impact of L1 on L2 even in dominant L2 environments.
Basak Özkara, Gülay Cedden, Christiane von Stutterheim, et al.· Acta Psychologica· 0 citations
Lexical availability (LA) refers to the subset of the mental lexicon that speakers readily activate in response to specific thematic prompts. It reflects the accessibility of lexical knowledge and is commonly characterized by the degree of lexical consensus observed across members of a speech community. This study investigates comparative intra-individual LA in speakers with English as the dominant language (DL) and Spanish as a heritage language (HL), addressing a gap in cross-language, within-subject research.
A convenience sample of 31 undergraduate students at a university in California, USA, completed a free-association LA test in both English and Spanish according to the Pan-Hispanic Lexical Availability Project. Responses were lemmatized and processed with Dispogen; analyses examined size, consensus, core versus peripheral composition, and patterns of thematic contamination across domains (e.g., professions, city).
Across most domains, the DL (English) exhibited a broader, more consensual lexical core, while the HL (Spanish) retained a longer low-frequency tail containing items that appear culturally specific, toponyms, and identity-linked references. Analyses also revealed systematic thematic contamination between languages and clear differences in the makeup of core versus peripheral lexica.
Findings suggest that English-dominant, Spanish-heritage speakers maintain distinct distributions of high-consensus (core) and low-frequency (peripheral) vocabulary across languages. These patterns have direct pedagogical implications: empirical guidance from LA profiles can inform targeted interventions that combine heritage-language maintenance with focused instruction in formal and academic registers, and help shape institutional policies supporting bilingual education.
Eladio Donoso, Pablo M Oliva Parera· International Journal of Bil...· 0 citations
Multilingualism exists on a wide spectrum, and assessing an individual’s linguistic background and predicting language outcomes is challenging. To evaluate the predictive value of more precise language background questionnaires (LBQs) (e.g., Byers-Heinlein et al., 2020) we investigate acoustic-phonetic outcomes in young simultaneous bilinguals and link these to their backgrounds assessed through our detailed LBQ (cf. Rinker et al., 2017). We analyze elicited productions of (study 1) Russian vowels /i/ and /ɨ/ by 8- to 13-year-old Russian–English bilinguals, and (study 2) productions of voicing by 3- to 6-year-old German–Italian bilinguals. Both studies show differences in the realization of acoustic-phonetic cues of bilingual versus monolingual children. This may be indicative of motoric complexity involved in producing the formant-frequency height/movement of Russian /i/ or prevoicing; and/or can be interpreted as crosslinguistic sound-category interference from the majority/societal language (English; German) to the minority/heritage-language (Russian; Italian). Importantly, we find effects even in simultaneous bilinguals with daily heritage-language use and at least one native heritage-language parent. We argue that precise assessment of bilinguals’ ongoing language use can serve as a predictor for acoustic-phonetic outcomes, and will discuss possibilities for further modernization and standardization of LBQs, specifically in terms of (multi)media use, motivation, and clinical settings.
Evgeniya Maryutina, Theresa Bloder, Genevieve Medina et al.· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
We explore how Spanish gender features are processed by English–Spanish bilingual children from two contact zones (Sotogrande, Spain, and Gibraltar, United Kingdom), divided into two dominance groups. The children come from two schools in which both languages are spoken, while English is the language of instruction. We present offline and online processing data involving linguistic code-switching between subjects and adjectives (Adj) in copulative constructions (the window es is roja red). Two issues are targeted to explore the mental representation that bilinguals have when their two languages are simultaneously activated. (i) The directionality of the switch provides information as to whether or not having to value gender features should result in a more economical representation. (ii) The gender agreement mechanisms that could be enforced when a Spanish adjective switch is processed provide information as to the importance that gender feature valuation has for bilinguals. Data show that no differences appear across the two child groups, which suggests that dominance does not reflect the similar representation that the two bilingual groups seem to have. The preference for English Adj switches and for gender matching Spanish Adj switches is linked to the properties of the two languages involved in the switch and to the hierarchy of processing difficulties.
This study investigates morphological code-mixing, the combination of morphemes from two languages within a single word, in the spontaneous speech of young German–English bilingual children. Following a usage-based perspective, the study asks whether children’s morphological code-mixing shows systematic patterns and whether these patterns reflect properties of the linguistic input they receive.
The analysis is based on longitudinal corpus data from three German–English simultaneous bilingual children aged 2 to 3 years. All children were raised in Germany in families following a one-parent–one-language approach, but their input conditions differed in the relative frequency and distribution of German and English. Utterances were coded for language type and analyzed for instances of morphological code-mixing.
Across the three corpora, 696 instances of morphological code-mixing were identified. Each mixed form was coded for type of mixing, part of speech, language of stems and affixes, and grammatical categories realized in inflectional mixing. Quantitative comparisons were conducted across children to examine distributional patterns and effects of differing input conditions.
Morphological code-mixing appeared in fewer than 2% of utterances but was produced by all children. Individual differences emerged in both frequency and types of mixes. Inflectional mixing was the most common pattern, especially German inflectional morphemes attached to English stems. Children with more balanced or shifting input conditions also produced German stems with English inflectional markers. Mixed compounds occurred in both German–English and English–German configurations. These patterns mirrored the children’s input distributions and developmental shifts in language proficiency.
The results support a usage-based account in which morphological code-mixing arises from entrenched morphological frames and analogical extension rather than violations of grammatical constraints.
The study shows that morphological code-mixing in early bilingual development is systematic, input-sensitive, and shaped by children’s experience with partially schematic constructions across their two languages.
Antje Endesfelder Quick, Stefan Hartmann, Nikolas Koch· International Journal of Bil...· 0 citations