What can artificial languages reveal about morphosyntactic processing in bilinguals

This article reviews work that has employed artificial languages to investigate the learning and processing of additional language grammar in bilinguals, with a focus on morphosyntactic processing in sentence contexts. The article first discusses research that has utilized artificial languages to elucidate two central issues in research on bilingual third language learning and processing: the role of prior language-learning experience and cross-linguistic transfer from the native and second languages to the third. Then, research that has compared bilingual third language to monolingual second language grammar processing is discussed, with specific consideration of hypothesized bilingual advantages at language learning. Finally, future directions in artificial language learning research on bilingual morphosyntactic processing are considered.