How do brains of multilingual speakers process native and non-native languages in speaking? This thesis has attempted to characterize the multilingual experience in late language learners, focusing on the processing of two distinct but similar lexico-syntactic features: classifiers in Chinese and grammatical gender in Dutch, across different populations. The thesis investigated whether and how lexico-syntactic features are processed during non-native language (L2) speech production and compared this to their processing in native language (L1) production. Moreover, it explored the role of linguistic similarity in L2 lexico-syntactic feature processing. This thesis explored these questions using a combination of behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) methods to gain detailed insight into language production and provided a thorough description of the statistical approach used to analyze complex datasets.
