One hypothesis holds that bilingual children's cross-linguistic transfer occurs in spontaneous production when there is structural overlap between the two languages and ambiguity in at least one language (Döpke, 1998; Hulk and Müller, 2000). This study tested whether overlap/ambiguity of adjective–noun strings in English and French predicted transfer. In English, there is only one order (adjective–noun) while in French both adjective–noun and noun–adjective order are allowed, with the latter as the default. Unidirectional transfer from English to French was predicted. 35 French–English preschool bilingual children (and 35 age-matched English monolinguals and 10 French monolinguals) were asked to name pictures by using an adjective–noun string. In addition to the reversing adjective–noun strings in French as predicted by the overlap/ambiguity hypothesis, the bilingual children reversed more adjective–noun strings in English than monolinguals. It is proposed that cross-linguistic transfer might better be understood as an epiphenomenon of speech production.

Bilingual acquisition can shed light on the cues children use in acquiring language. The purpose of this paper was to examine whether frequency, ambiguity or language dominance could explain crosslinguistic transfer in compound nouns. Crosslinguistic transfer would appear in the form of compound reversals. 25 monolingual English children between the ages of three and four years and 25 age-matched French-English bilingual children were asked to create and indicate their understanding of novel compound nouns. In production, the bilingual children reversed compounds in English more often than the monolingual children but equally often in French and English. In comprehension, there were no differences between groups. These results cannot be explained by any previous explanation of transfer. Implications for the theory of language acquisition are discussed.

By school age, some bilingual children can score equivalently to monolinguals in receptive vocabulary but still lag in expressive vocabulary. In this study, we test whether bilingual children have greater difficulty with lexical access, as has been reported for adult bilinguals. School-aged French–English bilingual children were given tests of receptive vocabulary and picture naming. The bilingual children's performance was compared to English monolinguals'. We found that bilingual children scored slightly lower on some measures of comprehension and lower on producing the target word. The bilinguals were more likely to correctly identify the target picture even if they had not produced the name. The differences in comprehension but not production could be statistically accounted for by the variation in receptive vocabulary. These results suggest that, school-aged bilinguals can be close to monolinguals in receptive vocabulary but have a harder time accessing the exact word for production. We discuss reasons for this difficulty with lexical access and strategies that children used when they did not produce the target word.

Many doctors work or train in foreign countries and speak with a foreign accent. People sometimes assume that a person who speaks with a foreign accent possesses negative traits and personality characteristics. The purpose of this study is to test if doctors who speak with a foreign accent are perceived as less competent than doctors who speak with a standard accent. Both Caucasian Canadian and Chinese Canadian undergraduates rated the competence of a doctor speaking English with either a standard Canadian accent or a Chinese accent. The doctor was delivering either good or bad news about the patient’s cholesterol levels or cancer. Previous research has shown that when reminded of death, participants favor in-group members. We found that the Chinese-accented doctor’s competence was judged more negatively than the standard Canadian accented doctor by all participants. Both doctors were deemed less competent when delivering bad news than good news. These results suggest that foreign-accented doctors face biases about their competence from their patients.

Gestures are often used while speaking to aid in the speaker's packaging of the verbal message and/or to aid the listener in decoding the message. The ways in which bilinguals use gestures are reviewed in this article. Researchers have predicted that bilinguals' gesture use is related to bilinguals' language proficiency. However, no clear pattern of a link between proficiency and gesture use has been observed across studies, probably because gestures rarely compensate for weak language proficiency, functioning instead to facilitate speech production in both first and second language use. Researchers have reported bilinguals using language-specific gestures in the other language. In addition, bilinguals have been shown to use gestures at a higher rate than monolinguals. These results suggest that cross-linguistic transfer can apply to gestures, as well as to other linguistic units. In conclusion, gestures play an important role in accessing language in the process of speech production. This conclusion has implications for second-language teaching; teaching through gestures and speech might be more effective than teaching the spoken component alone.