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Two experiments using Spanish-English bilinguals from the University of Arizona and Pima Community College (Tucson, Arizona) investigated information processing and semantic integration of texts presented in Spanish and English. Using propositions (sentences) developed by Kieras (1978) and their Spanish translations, this study sought to determine how bilinguals store and retrieve information when contiguous and interleaved paragraphs are presented in both languages. It was hypothesized that bilinguals store language tags for encoded information in their memory. Storage capacity may be taxed, however, such that recall will be less effective than when information is presented coherently and in only one language. Results showed that forcing bilinguals to keep language tags did in fact result in less correct recall in some instances and greater recall in other instances. Data suggested that bilinguals having to keep language tags may have had better recall because language links between propositions provided additional retrieval routes and increased the probability of recall. In general, results were consistent with the hypothesis that bilingual subjects have only one semantic memory system that is accessed via two different languages. The bilingual's memory performance may be affected, however, by the availability of differentiated language tags stored at the time of information encoding. An attempt was also made to determine language dominance of the 20 bilingual subjects who participated in Experiment II and to correlate this information with recall data. No reliable technique for gauging language dominance was found, nor were there any reliable correlations with recall performance.

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This dissertation investigated the extent of L2 (English) acquisition and L1 (Russian) maintenance of two age groups of Russian immigrants in the US and examined the relationship between participants' current language dominance and culture dominance. The study also aimed at enhancing theoretical knowledge about the methodology of assessing language and culture dominance and at establishing which of the measures used here (self-reports of language proficiency, three lexical fluency tests, writing tasks, and a culture questionnaire) are the most accurate and practical for determining the more dominant language and culture. In addition to quantitative data, interviews provided insights into the participants' views and opinions on their language and culture and were used to supplement the statistical results with personal comments.The results indicate a surprisingly high level of first language and culture maintenance in the younger group together with highly successful L2 acquisition and acculturation, marking this group as rather balanced bilingually and bi-culturally. The older participants, on the other hand, clearly maintain dominance in both Russian language and Russian culture. Significant correlations established between different language proficiency measures carry methodological importance for future studies.

The present investigation evaluates the effects of multiple language acquisition history on brain functional organization for language. To address a range of findings concerning the functional cerebral lateralization of the native (L1) and second languages (L2) of bilinguals, a meta-analysis was conducted on 71 studies that used behavioral paradigms to assess bilingual laterality. The predictive value of a number of theoretically identified moderators of cerebral asymmetry for language was assessed, namely, the age of second language (L2) acquisition, fluency in theL2, participant sex, experimental paradigm, linguistic task demands, relatedness of L1 and L2 structures, and context of language use. The results revealed no differences in the laterality of first and second languages within L2 acquisition age groups. Of the moderators tested, age of L2 acquisition was identified as the most reliable predictor of the direction of laterality. The conditions under which systematic similarities and differences in language lateralization among bilingual subgroups emerge are discussed in terms of implications for current models and theories concerning the functional organization of language in the bilingual brain.

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A unilingual and a bilingual primed lexical decision task were used to investigate priming effects produced by attended and ignored visual stimuli. In the Chinese language unilingual experiment, accelerated responses to the traditional Chinese character probe targets were observed when the traditional character probe target was the same as the preceding prime target (i.e., attended repetition, AR). However, when a traditional character “matched” a preceding simplified Chinese character prime distractor (i.e., ignored repetition, IR), the expected impaired responses (negative priming) were not observed. In the bilingual experiment (Chinese – English), prime stimuli were in Chinese and probe stimuli were in English. Both AR positive priming and IR negative priming between Chinese – English translation equivalents were produced by bilingual subjects in experiment 2. Further analyses were carried out by dividing subjects into two groups, one less proficient and the other more proficient in English. The contrasting patterns of performance produced by the more and less proficient bilinguals indicate that inhibitory mechanisms can simultaneously operate at two levels of abstraction – global language and local word; and these two types of inhibition can work in a quite independent manner. The contrasting response patterns by the more versus less proficient bilingual subjects also convincingly suggest shared storage for the conceptual representations of a Chinese-English bilingual’s two languages. Moreover, obtaining negative priming in Experiment 2, which uses a large set of 795 words as stimuli, provides strong evidence against the notion that negative priming is contingent on stimulus repetition. Rather, it confirms that processing demand or selection difficulty is critical for producing negative priming.

Five tachistoscopic studies were conducted to investigate patterns of hemispheric specialization for different types of word pair comparisons among monolinguals and fluent bilingual adults. Bilinguals were further grouped as "early" or "late" depending on whether their second language was acquired in infancy or in adolescence. All groups were faster at making orthographic comparisons for left visual field input but were faster in the right visual field for phonological and syntactic judgments. Semantic comparisons yielded no visual field asymmetries for monolinguals or late bilinguals but yielded a left visual field superiority for early bilinguals. Group differences in response strategy were also noted whereby early bilinguals favoured semantic processing and late bilinguals surface processing. The results are interpreted to suggest that lateralization patterns are primarily influenced by task-related processing demands but that early versus late onset of bilingualism predisposes the use of different processing strategies for performing a particular task.