A series of recent studies have shown that the once-assumed cognitive advantage of
bilingualism finds little support in the evidence available to date. Surprisingly, however, the …

This article focuses on the uncertainty surrounding the issue of the Critical Period
Hypothesis. It puts forward the case that, with regard to naturalistic situations, the hypothesis …

In 2005, Science magazine designated the problem of accounting for difficulties in L2
(second language) learning as one of the 125 outstanding challenges facing scientific …

This volume is the first handbook dedicated to language attrition, the study of how a
speaker's language may be affected by crosslinguistic interference and non-use. The effects …

Recent studies have demonstrated variation in language processing for monolingual and
bilingual speakers alike, suggesting that only by considering individual differences will an …

Second language (L2) sentence processing research studies how adult L2 learners
understand sentences in real time. I review how L2 sentence processing differs from …

This review aims at clarifying the concept of first language attrition by tracing its limits,
identifying its phenomenological and contextual constraints, discussing controversies …

Since the early 2000s, neurocognitive research on second language (L2) acquisition has
been controversial as to how plastic the human brain is after puberty. Recent studies have …

In this chapter, we were tasked to address the question,“What should every cognitive
psychologist know about bilingualism?” While there are many potential ways of …

The idea that there is a critical period (CP) for language acquisition that starts sometime after
birth and ends sometime around puberty has been central to language studies since …