Translation direction and word familiarity in word translation: an fNIRS study of intermediate Japanese learners of English

The neural basis of lexical tone in bilingual language processing: A MEG study

Proficiency-Dependent Reorganisation of Language and Control Networks during Second Language Processing: An fMRI Study of Korean–English Bilinguals

First Sounds, Second Language: How Word Onsets Spark Language Co-Activation in 3-Year-Old Bilinguals.

Adult and young bilinguals co-activate their languages to different degrees, even in entirely monolingual tasks. However, many studies use translation pairs with high phonological overlap (e.g., the English-GERMAN: "milk"-"MILCH"), making it difficult to discern the origin of the co-activation. This study examined language co-activation in Catalan-Spanish bilingual toddlers using words with minimal phonological overlap across translations. Thirty Catalan-Spanish bilingual three-year-olds (N  =  30; Mage =  36.38 months, range = 35.57-37.43) participated in a visual word paradigm conducted entirely in Catalan, searching for an absent target named in Catalan (e.g., "apple" in Catalan: "poma," Spanish: "MANZANA") among images with labels that shared the initial phoneme across languages or were unrelated. The design included three types of images: (a) direct phonologically related (e.g., Spanish "PATO" for "duck"), (b) indirect phonologically related (e.g., Catalan "mitjó" for "sock"), and (c) unrelated (e.g., "brush," "sandwich"). If bilingual toddlers co-activate languages, they should look more at phonologically related than unrelated images due to shared phonological onsets. The results supported the hypotheses and provided solid evidence that young bilinguals co-activate phonologically related words in their familiar languages. Moreover, contrasting direct and indirect (translation-mediated) competitors showed that language co-activation unfolds dynamically, with timing shaped by the number of links involved.

Cerebral Encoding of Word Classes is Distributed and Context-Dependent

Word classes such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives are fundamental units of language, but their neural encoding remains unclear. Here, we investigate whether word classes are processed as invariant, context-independent lexical categories or depend on sentence context during language processing. We analyse source-localized magnetoencephalography (MEG) data from 200 native Dutch participants who read or listened to sentences and their scrambled counterparts (word lists) from the MOUS dataset. Time-resolved encoding models are used to predict neural responses from major word classes (noun, verb, adjective) and other linguistic variables including word frequency, surprisal, entropy, word length, and ordinal position. Across modalities, we observe a significant interaction between word class and context (sentences vs. word lists), manifest as dynamic modulation of neural responses in a widespread cortical network including bilateral perisylvian, frontal, and midline regions previously implicated in lexicosemantic, structural, and pragmatic processing. This interaction emerges early and reappears later in processing, with distinct temporal profiles for reading and listening. Within-condition effects reveal that word class contributes to neural responses at the level of individual words, but this contribution is context-dependent: it is robust in sentences across modalities and in word-list reading, but absent in auditory word lists. These results indicate that word-class encoding is shaped by the interaction between word-level properties and sentence context during real-time language processing.

Emotional word processing in bilinguals: An oscillatory cascade from perception to regulation in the second language

Processing emotionally negative words in a second language (L2) feels less vivid and more cognitively demanding than in the first language (L1), yet the neural mechanisms underlying this difference remain poorly understood. Using single-trial modelling of event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs), we examined attention allocation to negative versus neutral words in highly proficient late Polish–English bilinguals performing a semantic categorisation task in a modified oddball paradigm. Valence and language modulated early posterior negativity (EPN) and P300, but not the N400. Mass-univariate analysis detected valence modulations in the N400 range, highlighting limitations of classic ERP approaches. Time–frequency analysis further revealed Language × Valence interactions: negative L2 words selectively elicited a cascade of delta, theta and alpha synchronisation from posterior to frontal regions across 59–641 ms, consistent with successive perceptual, lexical-semantic and regulatory processing stages. Emotional processing in L2 is thus qualitatively distinct, more effortful and regulated rather than simply being less efficient.

Effects of Semantic and Cross-Language Contextual Variation on Online Processing During Bilingual Novel Word Learning

This study examined how semantic and language-context variability influence online processing during bilingual novel word learning in sentences. Brazilian Portuguese–English bilinguals read novel English–Portuguese cognates embedded in repeated or varied sentences. Each target item was presented a total of four times in participants’ first language (L1), second language (L2), or both languages. We examined early (first fixation duration) and late (total reading time) eye-movement measures and assessed semantic knowledge in a post-test relatedness judgment task. The results showed that reading times decreased with repeated exposure across all conditions, reflected in shorter fixation durations and total reading times. Words presented in repeated sentence contexts were read faster than those presented in varied sentence contexts. The language context also modulated online reading behavior. Reading was faster in the L1 condition and longer in the mixed-language condition, particularly during initial exposures. Notably, individual differences in L2 vocabulary proficiency moderated these effects, with more proficient bilinguals showing faster adaptation to linguistic variability. Despite clear differences in online processing, semantic retrieval accuracy in the post-test did not vary across learning conditions, suggesting that differences in online processing did not translate into measurable differences in offline semantic knowledge under the present learning conditions.