The International Symposium on Bilingual and L2 Processing in Adults and Children (ISBPAC) was initiated by Shanley Allen and colleagues in 2016, and held at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany. The second edition was organised by Holger Hopp and colleagues and took place in 2018 at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany. ISBPAC 2020 (later re-named ISBPAC 2021), which was to take place on May 2020, in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, was held online the following year in 2021. ISBPAC 2022 was organised by Maki Kubota and colleagues, and took place at the AcqVA AURORA center at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on August 4th-5th, 2022.

When the ISBPAC symposium started out in 2016, it had the explicit aim to include research on children as well as adults. ISBPAC 2018 added “L2” to the title, to include all types of bilingualism ranging from fluent bilinguals to beginning L2 learners.