The Influence of Native-Language Phonology on Lexical Access: Exemplar-Based Versus Abstract Lexical Entries

This study used medium-term auditory repetition priming to investigate word-recognition processes. Highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals whose first language was either Catalan or Spanish were tested in a lexical decision task involving Catalan words and nonwords. Spanish-dominant individuals, but not Catalan-dominant individuals, exhibited repetition priming for minimal pairs differing in only one feature that is nondistinctive in Spanish (e.g.,see text), thereby indicating that they processed these words as homophones. This finding provides direct evidence both that word recognition uses a language-specific phonological representation and that lexical entries are stored in the mental lexicon as abstract forms.