Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism - Volume 16, Issue 2, 2026

This paper explores the concept of multiple grammars (MGs) and their implications for linguistic theory, language acquisition, and bilingual language knowledge. Drawing on evidence from phenomena such as scope interactions, verb raising, and agreement patterns, I argue that seemingly identical surface structures can be undergirded by different grammatical analyses that may compete within speaker populations. I then propose a typology of MG distributions, including shared MGs, competing MGs, and partial MGs, each with distinct consequences for acquisition and use. Contrary to expectations of simplification, bilingualism can sometimes lead to an expansion of grammatical analyses and does not always lead to the elimination of MGs. The paper discusses methods for predicting environments conducive to MGs, considering factors such as structural ambiguity and silent elements. The examination of MGs compels us to explore how learners navigate underdetermined input, especially in bilingual contexts, and to examine the interplay between gradient acceptability judgments and categorical grammatical distinctions. The study of MGs offers valuable insights into language variation, change, and the nature of linguistic competence.

In recent years, there has been considerable research into the factors contributing to cross-linguistic influence in the acquisition of a third language. Much of the focus has been on linguistic cues, with less emphasis (and conflicting results) on experiential factors, such as the role of dominance. Additionally, there is very little literature on the role of the language used for instruction in experiments, which may be argued to reflect a recency effect. In this article, we investigate whether dominance (in one of the previously acquired languages) and recency may be responsible for cross-linguistic influence in the third language at early stages of acquisition. We exposed four groups of Polish–English speakers to thirty-six lexical items in a new language (Norwegian), followed by a picture-matching task to ensure word comprehension. Participants gave forced-choice judgements on sentences where the morphosyntax was either Polish-like or English-like. Four properties were tested: articles, ditransitives, number agreement, and semantic gender. The results showed complex relationships between dominance, recency, and linguistic property, which are discussed in light of a foreign language effect, differential cognitive control, language domains, and previous L3 studies. Additionally, we suggest some experimental considerations for future L3 research.

Bilingualism has sometimes been associated with cognitive boosts, particularly in working memory (WM). However, it remains unclear whether such benefits extend to the comprehension of syntactically complex structures. We investigated this through a gamified character-selection task assessing comprehension of subject-relative clauses and object-relative clauses among monolingual (n = 31) and bilingual (n = 28) French-speaking children, as well as monolingual (n = 45) and bilingual (n = 43) German-speaking children aged 3 to 12. We examined whether comprehension correlated with verbal WM, measured through a nonword repetition task, and interference resolution ability, assessed through a Simon task and an analysis of comprehension errors. The results indicated no bilingual advantage: object-relative clauses were more difficult than subject-relative clauses across all groups and languages. While interference-related errors — misinterpreting object-relative clauses as subject-relative clauses more frequently than vice versa — surfaced in all groups, verbal WM correlated with object-relative comprehension only in French. These findings are discussed in relation to current theories of bilingualism and WM in language comprehension.

Brazilian Portuguese (BP) and Japanese have phonological repair strategies that involve vowel epenthesis in illicit consonant clusters, but whereas BP inserts /i/, Japanese inserts /ɯ/ as a default. For example, a loanword like ‘TikTok’ is typically produced as /ti.ki.tɔ.ki/ in BP and as /tik.kɯ.tok.kɯ/in Japanese. Here, we ask whether balanced BP–Japanese bilinguals apply their language-specific repair strategies separately, or whether one language’s strategy ‘spills over’ into the other, and if such spillover occurs, which individual factors predict its likelihood.

Twenty-two BP–Japanese bilinguals participated in a production task in which they were presented with stimuli containing illicit consonant clusters, e.g., /agbo/, and produced these forms within a BP or Japanese carrier sentence. A model predicting the likelihood of epenthesis type revealed that speakers mostly applied language-specific strategies separately, i.e., /i/-epenthesis in the BP sentences and /ɯ/-epenthesis in the Japanese sentences. However, in some cases, we observed ‘spillover’, e.g., /i/-epenthesis in Japanese or /ɯ/-epenthesis in BP. Individual variation in language dominance, aggregate immersion, and phonolexical perception acuity predicted the likelihood of such spillover. These findings contribute new production data to a growing body of literature on individual variation in bilinguals’ language-specific phonotactics.

We investigate the influence of the prosodic structure of German as first language (L1) on the application of the spirantization rule in Spanish as a second language (L2). According to the Prosodic Hierarchy, the prosodic domains in which phonological rules apply may vary according to whether the language has a grouping tendency or not. While Spanish spirantization (where /b d g/ are produced as [β ð ɣ] after continuant sounds) applies across the Intonational Phrase (IP), German restricts grouping processes to smaller domains, the largest of them being the phonological word (pword). We hypothesized that L1 German learners of Spanish apply spirantization progressively, starting from the pword. Twenty-six participants were recorded reading two texts with instances of /b d g/ within foot, pword, and IP. Results support that L1 German learners of Spanish spirantize mainly within feet, and less so within pwords and IPs; furthermore, consonants /b — d/ are more likely to be spirantized than /g/ across all contexts by more proficient learners. We conclude that the starting point of spirantization is not the largest one licensed by the learner’s L1, but that there is an L1-independent path where learners start from the smallest domain in the hierarchy.