Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Abstract During spoken word-recognition, bilinguals have been shown to access their two languages simultaneously. The present study examined effects of language proficiency and lexical status on parallel language activation. Language proficiency was manipulated by testing German-native and English-native bilingual speakers of German and English. Lexical status was manipulated by presenting target words that either overlapped in form across translation equivalents (cognate words) or did not overlap in form across translation equivalents (English-specific words). Participants identified targets (such as hen) from picture-displays that also included similar-sounding German competitor words (such as Hemd, “shirt”). Eye-movements to German competitors were used to index co-activation of German. Results showed that both bilingual groups co-activated German while processing cognate targets; however, only German-native bilinguals co-activated German while processing English-specific targets. These findings indicate that high language proficiency and cognate status boost parallel language activation in bilinguals. Acknowledgements This work was supported by grants NICHD 1R03HD046952-01A1 and NSF BCS-0418495 to the second author, and by a Northwestern University Graduate Research Grant to the first author. Thanks go to Margarita Kaushanskaya, James Booth, Cynthia Thompson, and Judith Kroll for insightful comments and discussion, and to Valerie Burt, Gayatri Menon, Naveen Malik, Vridhi Chhabria, Nicole Kaligeropolous, Nadia Cone, Olga Boukrina, and Avital Rabin for their assistance at various stages of the project. We are grateful to Manuel Carreiras and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and feedback on a previous version of this paper. Parts of this work were presented at the Fifth International Symposium on Bilingualism, and at the 27th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Notes 1For a linking hypothesis between linguistic processing and eye-movements, see Tanenhaus, Magnuson, Dahan, and Chambers (Citation2000). 2This translation was made by a fluent German–English bilingual, and back-translated to English by two other fluent German–English bilinguals for reliability. The German and English versions were then balanced by-item on word frequency [CELEX lexical database, Baayen, Piepenbrock, English target condition, F(2, 28) = 45.2, p<.001). Planned post-hoc comparisons yielded differences between low- and medium-overlap conditions, as well as between medium- and high-overlap conditions and between low- and high-overlap conditions (LSD post-hocs: p<.01). Significant differences between the three conditions were also found in terms of phonemes (cognate target condition, F (2, 30) = 18.6, p<.001; English target condition, F (2, 28) = 4.8, p<.05, and in terms of phonetic features: cognate target condition, F (2, 30) = 10.2, p<.001; English target condition, F (1, 28) = 6.1, p<.01. 4Of these, the target-competitor pairs cylinder / Zylinder (top-hat) and lock / Lockenwickler (curlers) were excluded due to within-language competition. The picture of curlers contained locks (of hair) and the top hat was cylinder-shaped. For evidence on eye-movements due to shape-similarities, see Dahan however, this is not the case. Monolingual priming studies suggest that degree of phonological overlap influences co-activation of two words (Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). Further, Weber and Cutler (2004) found a target-competitor overlap effect in Dutch-native bilinguals who processed words with confusable vowels in their second language, English. Therefore, since phonological overlap effects have been found within native and non-native languages, the absence of phonological overlap sensitivity, due to overall high L1 co-activation, is not a plausible account.
Blumenfeld et al. (Mon,) studied this question.