Bilingualism is a ubiquitous global phenomenon. Beyond being a language experience, bilingualism also entails a social experience, and it interacts with development and learning, with cognitive and neural consequences across the lifespan. The authors of this volume are world renowned experts across several subdisciplines including linguistics, developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. They bring to light bilingualism’s cognitive, developmental, and neural consequences in children, young adults, and older adults. This book honors Ellen Bialystok, and highlights her profound impact on the field of bilingualism research as a lifelong experience. The chapters are organized into four sections: The first section explores the complexity of the bilingual experience beyond the common characterization of “speaking multiple languages.” The next section showcases Ellen Bialystok’s earlier impact on psychology and education; here the contributors answer the question “how does being bilingual shape children’s development?” The third section explores cognitive and neuroscientific theories describing how language experience modulates cognition, behavior, and brain structures and functions. The final section shifts the focus to the impact of bilingualism on healthy and abnormal aging and asks whether being bilingual can stave off the effects of dementia by conferring a “cognitive reserve.”

This innovative volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of the relationship between language and cognition with a focus on bilinguals. It brings together contributions from international leading figures in various disciplines and showcases contemporary research on the emerging area of bilingual cognition. The first part of the volume discusses the relationship between language and cognition as studied in various disciplines, from psychology to philosophy to anthropology to linguistics, with chapters written by some of the major thinkers in each discipline. The second part concerns language and cognition in bilinguals. Following an introductory overview and contributions from established figures in the field, bilingual cognition researchers provide examples of their latest research on topics including time, space, motion, colors, and emotion. The third part discusses practical applications of the idea of bilingual cognition, such as marketing and translation. The volume is essential reading for researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in language and cognition, or in bilingualism and second languages.

This collection brings together leading names in the field of bilingualism research to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Studies in Bilingualism series. Over the last 25 years the study of bilingualism has received a tremendous amount of attention from linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists. The breadth of coverage in this volume is a testament to the many different aspects of bilingualism that continue to generate phenomenal interest in the scholarly community. The bilingual experience is captured through a multifaceted prism that includes aspects of language and literacy development in child bilinguals with and without developmental language disorders, language processing and mental representations in adult bilinguals across the lifespan, and the cognitive and neurological basis of bilingualism. Different theoretical approaches – from generative UG-based models to constructivist usage-based models – are brought to bear on the nature of bilingual linguistic knowledge. The end result is a compendium of the state-of-the-art of a field that is in constant evolution and that is on an upward trajectory of discovery.

Psycholinguistics – the field of science that examines the mental processes and knowledge structures involved in the acquisition, comprehension, and production of language – had a strong monolingual orientation during the first four decades following its emergence around 1950. The awareness that a large part of mankind speaks more than one language – that this may impact both on the way each individual language is used and on the thought processes of bilinguals and multilinguals, and that, consequently, our theories on human linguistic ability and its role in non-linguistic cognition are incomplete and, perhaps, false – has led to a steep growth of studies on bilingualism and multilingualism since around 1995. This textbook introduces the reader to the field of study that examines language acquisition, comprehension and production from the perspective of the bilingual and multilingual speaker. It furthermore provides an introduction to studies that investigate the implications of being bilingual on various aspects of non-linguistic cognition. The major topics covered are the development of language in children growing up in a bilingual environment either from birth or relatively soon after, late foreign language learning, and word recognition, sentence comprehension, speech production, and translation processes in bilinguals. Furthermore, the ability of bilinguals and multilinguals to generally produce language in the "intended" language is discussed, as is the cognitive machinery that enables this. Finally, the consequences of bilingualism and multilingualism for non-linguistic cognition and findings and views regarding the biological basis of bilingualism and multilingualism are presented. The textbook’s primary readership are students and researchers in Cognitive Psychology, Linguistics, and Applied Linguistics, but teachers of language and translators and interpreters who wish to become better informed on the cognitive and biological basis of bilingualism and multilingualism will also benefit from it.

Describes how intellectual development of bilingual children differs from that of monolingual children.

A book on those who know and use two or more languages: Who are they? How do they do it?

This collection brings together two areas of research that are currently receiving great attention in both scientific and public spheres: cognitive aging and bilingualism. With ongoing media focus on the aging population and the need for activities to forestall cognitive decline, experiences that appear effective in maintaining functioning are of great interest. One such experience is lifelong bilingualism. Moreover, research into the cognitive effects of bilingualism has increased dramatically in the past decade, making it an exciting area of study. This volume combines these issues and presents the most recent research and thinking into the effects of bilingualism on cognitive decline in aging. The contributors are all leading scholars in their field. The result is a state-of-the art collection on the effect of bilingualism on cognition in older populations for both healthy aging and aging with dementia. The papers will be of interest to researchers, students, and health professionals.