Serial communication with two devices
See SoftwareSerial Write to return Read in Serial Monitor? - SoftwareSerial cannot both read and write at the same time.

However HardwareSerial can.


  Could this be achieved by using SoftwareSerial with one and the hardware serial port with the other?


Yes.




  So, likewise, there is no way to read from both devices using only SoftwareSerial?


That is correct. Not at the same time. SoftwareSerial uses an interrupt to detect the start bit of incoming data. So far so good. But once it gets it, it leaves interrupts disabled while it goes into a timed loop to read all the bits.

Thus, it is impossible for it to react to another incoming byte on another pin at the same time.

Still, you could receive on SoftwareSerial on one pin, and HardwareSerial on another. With HardwareSerial the hardware will run in the background, receiving the byte.