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Abstract The effects of bilingual language experience on cognitive control are still debated. A recent proposal is that being bilingual enhances attentional control. This is based on studies showing smaller effects of the nature of the preceding trial on the current trial in bilinguals (Grundy et al., 2017). However, performance on such tasks can also be accounted for by lower-level processes such as the binding and unbinding of stimulus and response features. The current study used a Partial Repetition Cost paradigm to explicitly test whether language experience can affect such processes. Results showed that bi- and monolinguals did not differ in their responses when the stimulus features were task-relevant. However, the bilinguals showed smaller partial repetition costs when the features were task-irrelevant. These findings suggest that language experience does not affect lower-level processes, and supports the view that bilinguals exhibit enhanced attentional disengagement. 

According to certain approaches to adaptation, readers and listeners quickly adjust their processing of sentences to match properties of recently encountered sentences. The present preregistered study used ERP (event-related brain potentials) to investigate how and when readers change their processing in response to recent exposure to sentences of a particular structure. We presented English speakers (n = 36) with three virtual blocks of English sentences with and-coordination ambiguities. In the first and third block, the ambiguity was always resolved towards a noun phrase (NP-) coordination; in the second block, the structure was always a clausal (S-) coordination. We manipulated the plausibility of the critical noun after the conjunct. N400 and P600 plausibility effects were probed to see to what extent the reader preferred an NP- coordination or expected the sentence to continue differently. Our results suggest that readers change their processing as a function of recent exposure but that they do not immediately adapt to the target structure. Furthermore, we observed substantial individual variation in the type and change in response over the course of the study. The idea that structural adaptation is immediate and a direct reflection of the properties of the recent context therefore needs to be fine-tuned.