Article published In: Bilingualism and Executive Function: An interdisciplinary approach
Edited by Irina A. Sekerina and Lauren Spradlin
[Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 6:5] 2016
► pp. 669–684
Referring expressions and executive functions in bilingualism
Published online: 13 July 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15055.sor
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.15055.sor
Abstract
Recent research has shown that the bilingual experience has positive effects on non-linguistic cognition (Bialystok, E. 2009. Bilingualism: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 121: 3–11. ; Costa, A., and Sebastian-Galles, N. (2014). How does the bilingual experience sculpt the brain? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 151: 336–345. ) but also negative effects on language, for example on vocabulary size and lexical fluency (Pearson, B.Z., & Fernandez, S.C. & Oller, D.K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning 431: 93–120. ). While most of the linguistic ‘disadvantages’ of bilingualism have been discussed in the lexical domain, this question is scaled up here to the sentence level and a novel theoretical framework is proposed which explicitly connects psychological and linguistic research. It is suggested that the bilingual experience may (a) affect the reciprocal interactions between language and general cognition, and (b) modulate the relation between components of executive functions. These effects may in turn influence the processing of particular linguistic structures, such as anaphoric expressions, and lead to bilingual-monolingual differences that could be regarded as ‘disadvantages’ but are in fact the result of normal adaptive changes due to the bilingual experience. Future experimental research validating this proposal may benefit both linguistic models of anaphora resolution and psychological models of cognitive control in monolinguals and bilinguals.
Keywords: Bilingualism, pronominal use, executive functions
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Anaphoric expressions in bilinguals
- 3.Potential explanations
- 4.Conclusion
- Author queries
References
References (67)
Arnold, J., Bennetto, L. & Diehl, J. 2009. Reference production in young speakers with and without autism: Effects of discourse status and processing constraints. Cognition 1101: 131–146.
Bak, T., Vega-Mendoza, M. and Sorace, A. 2014. Never too late? An advantage on tests of auditory attention extends to late bilinguals. Frontiers in Psychology, volume 5, article 485.
Baum, S. and Titone, D. (2014). Moving towards a neuroplasticity view of bilingualism, executive control, and aging. Applied Psycholinguistics, 351, 857–894.
Belletti, A., Bennati, E. & Sorace, A. 2007. Theoretical and developmental issues in the syntax of subjects: evidence from near-native Italian. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 251: 657–689.
Bini, M. 1993. La adquisicíon del italiano: mas allá de las propiedades sintácticas del parámetro pro-drop. In J. Liceras (ed.) La linguistica y el analisis de los sistemas no nativos, 126–139. Ottawa: Doverhouse.
Bialystok, E. 2002. Acquisition of literacy in bilingual children: a framework for research. Language Learning 521: 159–199.
Bialystok, E. & Martin, M. 2004. Attention and inhibition in bilingual children: evidence from the dimensional change card sort task. Developmental Science 71: 325–339.
Bialystok, E. 2009. Bilingualism: the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 121: 3–11.
Bialystok, E., Craik, F., Green, D. & Gollan, T. 2009. Bilingual minds. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 101: 89–129.
Bialystok, E. 2015. Bilingualism and the development of executive function: the role of attention. Child Development Perspectives 91: 117–121.
Blumenfeld, H. & Marian, V. 2011. Bilingualism influences inhibitory control in auditory comprehension. Cognition 1181: 245–257.
Braver, T. 2012. The variable nature of cognitive control: a dual mechanism framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 161: 106–113.
Brown-Schmidt, S. 2009. The role of executive function in perspective taking during online language comprehension. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 161: 893–900.
Calabria, M. Hernandez, M., Branzi, F. and Costa, A. 2012. Qualitative differences between bilingual language control and executive control: evidence from task-switching. Frontiers in Psychology 21 ( ).
Carminati, M. N. 2002: The Processing of Italian Subject Pronouns, PhD Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
2005: Processing reflexes of the Feature Hierarchy (Person > Number > Gender) and implications for linguistic theory. Lingua 1151: 259–285.
Chamorro, G., Sorace, A. and Sturt, P. 2015. What is the source of L1 attrition? The effects of recent re-exposure on Spanish speakers under L1 attrition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. .
Costa, A., Hernandez, M., & Sebastián-Gallés, N. 2008. Bilingualism aids conflict resolution: Evidence from the ANT task. Cognition 1061: 59–86.
Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. 2004. Lexical access in bilingual speech production: evidence from language switching in highly proficient bilinguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language 501: 491–511.
Costa, A., Santesteban, M., and Ivanova, I. (2006). How do highly proficient bilinguals control their lexicalization process? Inhibitory and language-specific selection mechanisms are both functional. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 321: 1057–1074.
Costa, A., and Sebastian-Galles, N. (2014). How does the bilingual experience sculpt the brain? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 151: 336–345.
de Bruin, A., Treccani, B. and Della Sala, S. (2015). Cognitive advantage in bilingualism: An example of publication bias? Psychological Science 261: 99–107.
de Prada Pérez, A. 2009. Subject expression in Minorcan Spanish: Consequences of contact with Catalan. Unpublished PhD dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University.
Duñabeitia, J. A., Hernández, J. A., Antón, E., Macizo, P., Estévez, A., Fuentes, L. J., and Carreiras, M. (2014). The inhibitory advantage in bilingual children revisited: myth or reality? Experimental Psychology 611: 234–251.
Goschke, T. and Dreisbach, G. 2008. Conflict-triggered goal shielding: response conflicts attenuate background monitoring for prospective memory cues. Psychological Science 191: 25–32.
Green, D.W. 1998. Mental control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11: 67–81.
Grimshaw, J. and Samek-Lodovici, V. 1998. Optimal subjects and subject universals. In Barbosa, P., Fox, D., Hagstrom, P., McGinnis, M., Pesetsky, D. (eds.) Is the Best Good Enough? Optimality and Competition in Syntax, 193–219. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grosjean, F. 1998. Studying bilinguals: methodological and conceptual issues. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 11: 131–149.
Grundy, J. G., and Shedden, J. M. 2014. A role for recency of response conflict in producing the bivalency effect. Psychological Research 781: 679–691.
Hendriks, P., Koster, K. and Hoeks, J. 2014. Referential choices across the lifespan: why children and elderly adults produce ambiguous pronouns. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 291: 391–407.
Kraš, T., Sturt, P. and Sorace, A. 2014. Native and non-native processing of Italian subject pronouns: Evidence from eye-tracking. Paper presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP) 20, Edinburgh.
Kroll, J. and Bialystok, E. 2013. Understanding the consequences of bilingualism for language processing and cognition. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 251: 497–514.
Lozano, C. 2006. The development of the syntax-discourse interface: Greek learners of Spanish. In Torrens, V. and Escobar, L. (eds). The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages, 371–399. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Malgaza, P. & Bel, A. 2006. Null subjects at the syntax-pragmatics interface: Evidence from Spanish interlanguage of Greek speakers. In M.G. O’Brien, C. Shea, and J. Archibald (eds.), Proceedings of GASLA 2006, 88–97. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Mendes, C. & Iribarren, I. C. 2007. Fixação do parâmetro do sujeito nulo na aquisição do português europeu por hispanofalantes. In M. Lobo and M. A. Coutinho (eds.), XXII Encontro Nacional da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística: Textos seleccionados, 483–498. Lisbon: Associação Portuguesa de Linguística.
Meuter, R. & Allport, A. 1999. Bilingual language switching in naming: asymmetric costs of language selection. Journal of Memory and Language 401: 25–40.
Mishra, R., Hilchey, M., Singh, N., and Klein, R. 2012. On the time course of exogenous cueing effects in bilinguals: higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid endogenous disengagement. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 651: 1502–1510.
Montrul, S., Dias, R., & Thomé-Williams, A. 2008. Subject expression in the non-native acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese. In A. Pires and J. Rotman (eds.) Minimalist Eneuiqries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition: Case Studies Across Portuguese. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nieuwland, M. and van Berkum, J. 2006. Individual differences and contextual biases in pronoun resolution: evidence from ERPs. Brain Research 11181: 155–167.
Novick, J., Hussey, E., Teubner-Rhodes, S., Harbison, J., and Bunting, M. 2014. Clearing the garden path: improving sentence processing through cognitive control training. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 291: 186–217.
Paap, K. R. and Greenberg, Z. L. (2013). There is no coherent evidence for a bilingual advantage in executive processing. Cognitive Psychology 661: 232–258.
Pearson, B.Z., & Fernandez, S.C. & Oller, D.K. (1993). Lexical development in bilingual infants and toddlers: comparison to monolingual norms. Language Learning 431: 93–120.
Phillips, W. & Silverstein, S. 2003. Convergence of biological and psychological perspectives on cognitive coordination in schizophrenia. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 261: 65–138.
Robertson, I.H., Ward, T., Ridgeway, V., & Nimmo-Smith, I. 1994. Test of Everyday Attention. Cambridge: Thames Valley Test Company.
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., Filiaci, F. and Baldo, M. 2009. Bilingual children’s sensitivity to specificity and genericity: evidence from metalinguistic awareness. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 121: 239–267.
Serratrice, L. Sorace, A. Filiaci, F. and Baldo, M. 2012. Pronominal objects in English-Italian and Spanish-Italian bilingual children. Applied Psycholinguistics 331: 725–751.
Sorace, A. 2003. Near-nativeness. In M. Long and C. Doughty (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, 130–152. Oxford: Blackwell.
2005. Selective optionality in language development. In L. Cornips and K.P. Corrigan (eds.) Syntax and Variation. Reconciling the Biological and the Social, 55–80. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2006a. Possible manifestations of shallow processing in advanced second language speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics 271: 88–91.
2006b. Gradience and optionality in mature and developing grammars. In G. Fanselow, C. Fery, M. Schlesewsky and R. Vogel (eds.) Gradience in Grammars: Generative Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2011. Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 11: 1–33.
2012. Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism: a reply to peer commentaries. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 21: 209–216.
Sorace, A. & Filiaci, F. 2006. Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian. Second Language Research 221: 339–368.
Sorace, A. & Serratrice, L. 2009. Internal and external interfaces in bilingual language development: Beyond structural overlap. International Journal of Bilingualism 131: 195–210.
Sorace, A., Serratrice, L. Filiaci, F. & Baldo, M. 2009. Discourse conditions on subject pronoun realization: testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual children. Lingua 1191: 460–477.
Teubner-Rhodes, S., Mishler, A., Corbett, R., Andreu, L., Sanz-Torrent, M., Trueswell, J., and Novick, J. 2016. The effects of bilingualism on conflict monitoring, cognitive control, and garden-path recovery. Cognition 1501: 213–231.
Tipper, S. P. 1985. The negative priming effect: Inhibitory priming by ignored objects. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 371: 571–590.
Titone, D., Prentice, K. & Wingfield, A. 2000. Resource allocation during spoken discourse processing: Effects of age and passage difficulty as revealed by self-paced listening. Memory & Cognition 28 (6): 1029–1040.
Treccani, B., Argyri, E., Sorace, A. & Della Sala, S. 2009. Spatial negative priming in bilingualism. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 161: 320–327.
Tsimpli, I.M. & Sorace, A. 2006. Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse phenomena. Proceedings of BUCLD 301.
Tsimpli, T., Sorace, A., Heycock, C. & Filiaci, F. 2004. First language attrition and syntactic subjects: a study of Greek and Italian near-native speakers of English. International Journal of Bilingualism 81: 257–277.
Vega-Mendoza, M., West, H., Sorace, A. and Bak, T. 2015. The impact of late, non-balanced bilingualism on cognitive performance. Cognition 1371: 40–46.
Cited by (53)
Cited by 53 other publications
Cairncross, Alex, Margreet Vogelzang & Ianthi Tsimpli
De Cristofaro, Elisa & Koen Plevoets
Etxebarria, Eider & Silvina Montrul
Feng, Shuo & Kailun Zhang
Kubota, Maki, Vasiliki Chondrogianni, Satsuki Kurokawa, Stefanie Wulff & Jason Rothman
Martín-Villena, Fernando, Cristóbal Lozano & Antonella Sorace
Martín-Villena, Fernando, Antonella Sorace & Cristóbal Lozano
Montrul, Silvina
Quesada, Teresa & Cristóbal Lozano
Smith, Giuditta, Roberta Spelorzi, Antonella Sorace & Maria Garraffa
Su, Yi-ching, Antonella Sorace, Yuki Hirose, Keiko Mochizuki, Makiko Hirakawa, Mineharu Nakayama, Chia-hsing Chen & Ho-Yun Hsieh
Teixeira, Joana, Alexandra Fiéis & Ana Madeira
2025. Are non-native speakers sensitive to microvariation in anaphora resolution?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 15:5 ► pp. 688 ff.
Zingaretti, Mattia, Vasiliki Chondrogianni, D. Robert Ladd & Antonella Sorace
Bel, Aurora & Rut Benito
Di Domenico, Elisa, Diletta Comunello & Ioli Baroncini
2024. Extending the Decreased Activation Hypothesis. In Current Perspectives on Generative SLA – Processing, Influence, and Interfaces [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 70], ► pp. 37 ff.
Madeira, Ana, Alexandra Fiéis & Joana Teixeira
2024. Anaphora resolution in L2 European Portuguese. In Language Acquisition in Romance Languages [Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, 18], ► pp. 12 ff.
Mishina-Mori, Satomi, Yuki Nakano, Yuri Jody Yujobo & Yumiko Kawanishi
Su, Yi-Ching, Antonella Sorace, Yuki Hirose, Keiko Mochizuki, Makiko Hirakawa & Mineharu Nakayama
Casado, Alba, Jonas Walther, Agata Wolna, Jakub Szewczyk, Antonella Sorace & Zofia Wodniecka
Casado, Alba, Jonas Walther, Agata Wolna, Jakub Szewczyk, Antonella Sorace & Zofia Wodniecka
Chaves, Monica F., Cilene Rodrigues, Sidarta Ribeiro, Natália B. Mota, Mauro Copelli & Michal Ptaszynski
Chondrogianni, Vicky
2023. Cross-linguistic influences in bilingual morphosyntactic acquisition. In Cross-language Influences in Bilingual Processing and Second Language Acquisition [Bilingual Processing and Acquisition, 16], ► pp. 294 ff.
Foryś-Nogala, Małgorzata, Olga Broniś, Marcin Opacki & Agnieszka Otwinowska
Ionin, Tania, Maria Goldshtein, Tatiana Luchkina & Sofya Styrina
2023. Who did what to whom, and what did we already know?. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 13:3 ► pp. 343 ff.
Shormani, Mohammed
Vulchanova, Mila, Jacqueline Collier, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes & Valentin Vulchanov
Jiang, Shan & Huiping Zhang
Jiang, Shan & Huiping Zhang
2025. The acquisition of locative inversion at the syntax-pragmatics interface by Chinese learners of English. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA)
Otwinowska, Agnieszka, Marcin Opacki, Karolina Mieszkowska, Marta Białecka-Pikul, Zofia Wodniecka & Ewa Haman
Skrimpa, Vasileia, Vasilina Spanou, Christiane Bongartz, Eleni Peristeri, Maria Andreou & Despina Papadopoulou
Vulchanova, Mila, Valentin Vulchanov, Antonella Sorace, Cristina Suarez-Gomez & Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes
Di Domenico, Elisa & Simona Matteini
Jansen, Silke, Sonja Higuera del Moral, Jessica Stefanie Barzen, Pia Reimann & Markus Opolka
Mazzaggio, Greta, Daniele Panizza & Luca Surian
Di Domenico, Elisa, Ioli Baroncini & Andrea Capotorti
Ergün, Anna Lia Proietti
Genevska-Hanke, Dobrinka
Kubota, Maki, Caroline Heycock, Antonella Sorace & Jason Rothman
Sorace, Antonella
Vulchanova, Mila, Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes, Jacqueline Collier & Valentin Vulchanov
Jiang, Xiangyu & Liang Chen
Koulidobrova, Elena V.
2019. Argument omission in SignL2 acquisition by deaf learners. In Three Streams of Generative Language Acquisition Research [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 63], ► pp. 297 ff.
Meir, Natalia & Rama Novogrodsky
MEIR, Natalia & Rama NOVOGRODSKY
Teixeira, Joana
2019. From a Romance null subject grammar to a non-null subject
grammar. In Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 15 [Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory, 15], ► pp. 255 ff.
Teixeira, Joana
Teixeira, Joana
2021. The impact of explicit instruction on different types of linguistic properties. ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics 172:1 ► pp. 26 ff.
Tovar Torres, Antonia, Wolfgang Sebastian Schmeisser Nieto, Aina Garí Soler, Catalina Morey Matamalas & Wolfram Hinzen
Wu, Xiaojun & Liang Chen
Lozano, Cristóbal & Marcus Callies
Schimke, Sarah, Israel de la Fuente, Barbara Hemforth & Saveria Colonna
Sekerina, Irina A. & Lauren Spradlin
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
