Bilingualism: Not all we know now is old news

Abstract

The advent of personal computers in the late twentieth century introduced new research methodologies, transforming experimental bilingualism into a robust field. At the time, language research relied on modular, largely monolingual bottom-up approaches like the Language User Framework. Harris’s Cognitive Processes in Bilinguals (1992) marked a turning point, stimulating inquiries into core issues concerning bilingual representation, co-activation, and cross-linguistic interaction. Here, we discuss how the experimental study of bilingualism has both quantitatively and qualitatively evolved since this book’s publication. Some book topics have become mature research foci of their own (e.g., cross-language processing effects, bilingual cognitive control, computational modeling of bilingual processing), while others have shifted direction (e.g., from cerebral laterality to the bilingual brain more broadly). By highlighting advances in research on language membership and markedness, and addressing the value of computational models over recent large language models, we show how cognitive bilingualism research remains highly relevant today.