Each year the Cognitive Science Society honors David Rumelhart by awarding the Rumelhart Prize to an outstanding cognitive scientist whose research makes a significant contribution to the formal analysis of human cognition. Formal models of language, including those of Rumelhart and his associates, are well known to psycholinguists in the…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…

Children raised in the home as English or Welsh monolinguals or English-Welsh bilinguals were tested on untrained word form recognition using both behavioral and neurophysiological procedures. Behavioral measures confirmed the onset of a familiarity effect at 11 months in English but failed to identify it in monolingual Welsh infants between 9 and…

Purpose: In this study, the authors investigated speech rhythm acquisition by bilingual Spanish-English-speaking children, comparing their performance with functionally monolingual peers in both languages and to monolingual and bilingual adults. Method: Participants included younger children (3;9 [years;months] to 4;5.15 [years;months.days]),…

Theory of mind (ToM)--our ability to predict behaviors of others in terms of their underlying intentions--has been thought to be universal and invariant across different cultures. However, several ToM studies conducted outside the Anglo-American cultural or linguistic boundaries have obtained mixed results. To examine the influence of…

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals' L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., "piano") and homographs (e.g., "pan")] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living…

This article identifies some discursive processes by which White, middle-class, native-English-speaking, U.S.-born college students draw on a monolingualist ideology and position themselves and others within a language-race-nationality matrix. These processes construct the speakers' Whiteness and nativeness in English as unmarked and normal; mark…

This study presents data from an experiment on the interpretation of intrasentential anaphora in Italian by native Italian speakers and by English speakers who have learned Italian as adults and have reached a near-native level of proficiency in this language. The two groups of speakers were presented with complex sentences consisting of a main…

In 2002, Massachusetts voters passed Question 2, a law similar to its predecessors in California (Proposition 227) and Arizona (Proposition 203) to replace bilingual education with structured English immersion (SEI) programs. Using Ruiz's (1984) framework for language planning as an analytical lens, this study examined how three Massachusetts…

Among linguistic minorities of industrial nations proficiency speaking the dominant national language increases earnings and wages, but do similar results apply to autarkic linguistic minorities of developing nations? We contribute to studies of the returns to language skills by applying the human-capital approach to a society of hunters,…

The Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs) paradigm is motivated by the desire to combat linguistic discrimination, where speakers of discriminated languages find themselves unable to use their preferred language in society at large. However, in an increasingly globalised world where speakers may feel the need or the desire to travel across state…

This study reports the results of a picture verification task assessing the interpretation of intra-sentential anaphora and cataphora in Italian by a group of English-Italian bilingual eight-year-olds, a group of age-matched Italian monolinguals, and a group of Italian monolingual adults. No significant differences between the groups were observed…

A non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in English-speaking monolingual children and adolescents. Subjects in an experiment were asked to select frequency of non-English consonant clusters, and they were able to reconstruct the phonological hierarchy. (CK)

Includes a review, rebutting the arguments in the subject book, W. Butzkamm's "Aufgeklaerte Einsprachigkeit..." ("Enlightened Monolingualism. Toward the Un-Dogmatizing of FL Method"). A bibliography is also provided of all titles on the subject of monolingualism which have appeared in "Praxis des Neusprachlichen Unterrichts" from 1955 to 1974.…