Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

Recent research on bilingualism has shown that lexical access in visual word recognition by bilinguals is not selective with respect to language. In the present study, the authors investigated language-independent lexical access in bilinguals reading sentences, which constitutes a strong unilingual linguistic context. In the first experiment, Dutch-English bilinguals performing a 2nd language (L2) lexical decision task were faster to recognize identical and nonidentical cognate words (e.g., banaan-banana) presented in isolation than control words. A second experiment replicated this effect when the same set of cognates was presented as the final words of low-constraint sentences. In a third experiment that used eyetracking, the authors showed that early target reading time measures also yield cognate facilitation but only for identical cognates. These results suggest that a sentence context may influence, but does not nullify, cross-lingual lexical interactions during early visual word recognition by bilinguals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical competition during second-language listening: Sentence context, but not proficiency, constrains interference from the native lexicon.

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., Marie va décrire la poule [Marie will describe the chicken]). Displays depicted several objects including the final noun target (chicken) and an interlingual near-homophone (e.g., pool) whose name in English is phonologically similar to the French target (poule). Listeners’ eye movements reflected temporary consideration of the interlingual competitor when hearing the target noun, demonstrating cross-language lexical competition. However, competitor fixations were dramatically reduced when prior sentence information was incompatible with the competitor (e.g., Marie va nourrir… [Marie will feed…]). In contrast, interlingual competition from English did not vary according to participants’ rated proficiency in French, even though proficiency reliably predicted other aspects of processing behavior, suggesting higher proficiency in the active language does not provide a significant independent source of control over interlingual competition. The results provide new insights into the nature of parallel language activation in naturalistic sentential contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The activation of phonological representations by bilinguals while reading silently: Evidence from interlingual homophones.

These experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading silently in one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homophones (e.g., sank in English and cinq in French). French-English and English-French bilinguals completed an English lexical decision task. Decisions made by French-English bilinguals were significantly faster and more accurate for interlingual homophones than for matched English control words. In subsequent experiments, the homophone facilitation effect in the latency data disappeared when distractors were changed to pseudohomophones, when cognates and interlingual homographs were added to the experiment, and when the proportion of critical stimuli was decreased. However, the homophone effect in the error data remained. In contrast, English-French bilinguals revealed little evidence of an interlingual homophone effect. Several attempts were made to increase the saliency of the nontarget language, however these manipulations produced only a small effect in the error data. These results indicate that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific depending on the proficiency of the bilinguals and whether they are reading in their weaker or stronger language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition of Interlingual Homophones in Bilingual Auditory Word Recognition.

How do bilinguals recognize interlingual homophones? In a gating study, word identification and language membership decisions by Dutch-English bilinguals were delayed for interlingual homophones relative to monolingual controls. At the same time, participant judgments were sensitive to subphonemic cues. These findings suggest that auditory lexical access is language nonselective but is sensitive to language-specific characteristics of the input. In 2 cross-modal priming experiments, visual lexical decision times were shortest for monolingual controls preceded by their auditory equivalents. Response times to interlingual homophones accompanied by their corresponding auditory English or Dutch counterparts were also shorter than in unrelated conditions. However, they were longer than in the related monolingual control conditions, providing evidence for online competition of the 2 near-homophonic representations. Experiment 3 suggested that participants used sublexical cues to differentiate the 2 versions of a homophone after language nonselective access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frequency drives lexical access in reading but not in speaking: The frequency-lag hypothesis.

To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word frequency (high, low), context (none, low constraint, high constraint), and level of English proficiency (monolingual, Spanish–English bilingual, Dutch–English bilingual) on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times. Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading. Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context but larger in reading than in production with constraining context. Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraint contexts, and were reduced by high-constraint contexts only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency. These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production but a frequency-driven search in comprehension. The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Effects of word-initial letter sequence.

Tested the constraint hypothesis, which states that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of word-initial letter information obtainable in the parafoveal region, in 2 experiments. Ss were 36 college students with normal vision. Eye movements were monitored while Ss read sentences containing target words whose initial trigram (Exp I) or bigram (Exp II) imposed either a high or a low degree of constraint in the lexicon. In contradiction to the hypothesis, high-constraint words (e.g., dwarf) received longer fixations than did low-constraint words (e.g., clown), despite the fact that high-constraint words have an initial letter sequence shared by few other words in the lexicon. A comparison of fixation times in viewing conditions with and without parafoveal letter information showed that the amount of decrease in target fixation time due to prior parafoveal availability was the same for high- and low-constraint targets. It is concluded that increased familiarity of word-initial letter sequence is beneficial to lexical access and that familiarity affects the efficiency of foveal but not parafoveal processing. A list of the sentences used in the 2 experiments is appended. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What Is a TOT? Cognate and Translation Effects on Tip-of-the-Tongue States in Spanish-English and Tagalog-English Bilinguals.

The authors induced tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) for English words in monolinguals and bilinguals using picture stimuli with cognate (e.g., vampire, which is vampiro in Spanish) and noncognate (e.g., funnel, which is embudo in Spanish) names. Bilinguals had more TOTs than did monolinguals unless the target pictures had translatable cognate names, and bilinguals had fewer TOTs for noncognates they were later able to translate. TOT rates for the same targets in monolinguals indicated that these effects could not be attributed to target difficulty. Two popular TOT accounts must be modified to explain cognate and translatability facilitation effects, and cross-language interference cannot explain bilinguals' increased TOTs rates. Instead the authors propose that, relative to monolinguals, bilinguals are less able to activate representations specific to each language. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextual insensitivity in schizophrenic language processing: Evidence from lexical ambiguity.

The authors investigated whether contextual failures in schizophrenia are due to deficits in the detection of context or the inhibition of contextually irrelevant information. Eighteen schizophrenia patients and 24 nonpsychiatric controls were tested via a cross-modal semantic priming task. Participants heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions about visual targets related to the homonyms' dominant or subordinate meanings. When sentences moderately biased subordinate meanings (e.g., the animal enclosure meaning of pen), schizophrenia patients showed priming of dominant targets (e.g., paper) and subordinate targets (e.g., pig). In contrast, controls showed priming only of subordininate targets. When contexts strongly biased subordinate meanings, both groups showed priming only of subordinate targets. The results suggest that inhibitory deficits rather than context detection deficits underlie contextual failures in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lag invariance with forced encodings in free recall.

Describes an experiment in which 144 undergraduates read 28 sentences, each 6 words in length. The last word was a homograph for which either of 2 meanings could be biased by the context of the sentence. 6 of the homographs appeared twice, with 1, 6, or 11 sentences intervening between the 1st and 2nd presentation. For 72 of the Ss, the same meaning was biased on both occasions (condition SC), while the remaining Ss were given 2 different meanings (condition DC). In free recall of the homographs, probability of recall was an increasing function of the number of intervening sentences (lag) for condition SC, whereas this function was invariant with lag for condition DC. For both conditions, the probability of an early output of a homograph was also an increasing function of lag. Findings are interpreted within an encoding variability framework. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical selection is not by competition: A reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm.

The dominant view in the field of lexical access in speech production maintains that selection of a word becomes more difficult as the levels of activation of nontarget words increase-selection by competition. The authors tested this prediction in two sets of experiments. First, the authors show that participants are faster to name pictures of objects (e.g., "bed") in the context of semantically related verb distractors (e.g., sleep) compared with unrelated verb distractors (e.g., shoot). In the second set of experiments, the authors show that target naming latencies (e.g., "horse") are, if anything, faster for within-category semantically close distractor words (e.g., zebra) than for within-category semantically far distractor words (e.g., whale). In the context of previous research, these data ground a new empirical generalization: As distractor words become semantically closer to the target concepts-all else being equal-target naming is facilitated. This fact means that lexical selection does not involve competition, and consequently, that the semantic interference effect does not reflect a lexical level process. This conclusion has important implications for models of lexical access and interpretations of Stroop-like interference effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention and facilitation: Converging information versus inadvertent reading in Stroop task performance.

Disagreement exists about whether color–word Stroop facilitation is caused by converging information (e.g., Cohen et al., 1990; Roelofs, 2003) or inadvertent reading (MacLeod & MacDonald, 2000). Four experiments tested between these hypotheses by examining Stroop effects on response time (RT) both within and between languages. Words cannot be read aloud to produce facilitation between languages. Dutch–English bilingual participants named color patches while trying to ignore Dutch or English color words presented at a wide range of preexposure and postexposure stimulus onset asynchronies. The color patches were named in Dutch (Experiments 1 and 2) or English (Experiments 3 and 4). In all experiments, Stroop facilitation and interference effects were obtained in mean RTs with similar time courses within and between languages. Facilitation was generally present throughout the entire RT distributions. These results suggest that Stroop interference and facilitation have a common locus within and between languages, supporting the converging information hypothesis of Stroop facilitation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative priming in bilinguals: Some limits of interlingual facilitation effects.

Examined how the prior visual presentation of a word from one of a bilingual S's languages can facilitate the identification of an associated word from the other language. Results from performance on lexical decision tasks with 72 Ss show a different pattern of effects for intra- and interlingual conditions at 2 different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At a short SOA, no facilitation effect was observed between associated words from different languages. At a long SOA, facilitation was observed for both between- and within-language conditions, but the between-language effect was weaker. Results do not suggest direct interlingual links in the bilingual lexicon. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The dependence of lexical relatedness effects on syntactic connectedness.

Context effects on lexical decision were analyzed by manipulating lexical relatedness and syntactic connectedness. Related and unrelated word pairs were embedded in syntactic (e.g., "the author of this book/floor") and in scrambled (e.g., "the author the and book/floor") phrases. The sequences were presented serially and subjects made lexical decisions to the terminal targets. In four experiments, relatedness effects were substantial in syntactic phrases but only marginal in scrambled sequences. This result was unaffected by presentation rate or by blocking manipulations. A fifth experiment showed that the relatedness effect in syntactic phrases involved both facilitation of responses to related words and inhibition of responses to unrelated words. These results argue against a role for intralexical priming in on-line reading. They highlight the role of syntactic connectedness and suggest that contextual facilitation depends on the ease of integration of new words with the current text-level representation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical and sentence context effects in word recognition.

Three experiments examined lexical and sentence-level contributions to contextual facilitation effects in word recognition. Subjects named target words preceded by normal or scrambled sentence contexts that contained lexical associates of the target. In Experiment 1, normal sentences showed facilitation for related targets and inhibition for unrelated targets. Experiment 2 eliminated syntactically anomalous targets among unrelated items and showed only facilitation for related targets. In neither experiment was there any effect of relatedness for scrambled stimuli. Experiment 3 included syntactically normal but semantically anomalous sentences to test whether the failure of scrambled sentences to show priming was due to their syntactic incoherence. Normal sentences again showed contextual facilitation, but neither scrambled nor anomalous sentences showed such effects. The results indicate that there are sentence-context effects that do not arise solely from intralexical spreading activation and suggest that context facilitates the identification of a lexical candidate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language.

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch–English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch–English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]–leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of "neighborhood size" in reading and lexical decision.

Assessed the effects of neighborhood size ("N")—the number of words differing from a target word by exactly 1 letter (i.e., "neighbors")—on word identification. In Exps 1 and 2, the frequency of the highest frequency neighbor was equated, and N had opposite effects in lexical decision and reading. In Exp 1, a larger N facilitated lexical decision judgments, whereas in Experiment 2, a larger N had an inhibitory effect on reading sentences that contained the words of Exp 1. Moreover, a significant inhibitory effect in Exp 2 that was due to a larger N appeared on gaze duration on the target word, and there was no hint of facilitation on the measures of reading that tap the earliest processing of a word. In Exp 3, the number of higher frequency neighbors was equated for the high-N and low-N words, and a larger N caused target words to be skipped significantly more and produced inhibitory effects later in reading, some of which were plausibly due to misidentification of the target word when skipped. Regression analyses indicated that, in reading, increasing the number of higher frequency neighbors had a clear inhibitory effect on word identification and that increasing the number of lower frequency neighbors may have a weak facilitative effect on word identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic, phonological, and mediated priming in reading and lexical decisions.

Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether semantic activation of a concept spreads to phonologically and graphemically related concepts. In lexical decision or self-paced reading tasks, subjects responded to pairs of words that were semantically related (e.g., light–lamp), that rhymed (e.g., lamp–lamp), or that combined both of these relations through a mediating word (e.g., light–lamp). In one version of each task, test lists contained word–word pairs (e.g., light–lamp) as well as nonword–word (e.g., pown–table) and word–nonword pairs (e.g., month–poad); in another version, test lists contained only word–word pairs. The lexical decision and self-paced reading tasks were facilitated by semantic and rhyming relations regardless of the presence or absence of nonwords on the test lists. The effect of the mediated relation, however, depended on the presence of nonwords among the stimuli. When only words were included, there was no effect of the mediated relation, but when nonwords were included, lexical decision and self-paced reading responses were inhibited by the mediated relation. These inhibitory effects are attributed to processes occurring after lexical access, and the relative advantages of the self-paced reading task are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context and lexical access: Implications of nonword interference for lexical ambiguity resolution.

To eliminate potential "backward" priming effects, S. Glucksberg et al (see record 1986-29080-001) introduced a variant of the cross-modal lexical priming task in which subjects made lexical decisions to nonword targets that were modeled on a word related to either the contextually biased or unbiased sense of an ambiguous word. Lexical decisions to nonwords were longer than controls only when the nonword was related to the contextually biased sense of the ambiguous word, leading Glucksberg et al to conclude that context does constrain lexical access and that the multiple access pattern observed in previous studies was probably an artifact of backward priming. We did not find nonword interference when the nonword targets used by Glucksberg et al were preceded by semantically related ambiguous or unambiguous word primes. However, we did replicate their sentence context results when the ambiguous words were removed from the sentences. We conclude that the interference obtained by Glucksberg et al is due to postlexical judgments of the congruence of the sentence context and the target, not to context constraining lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in the time course of inferential processing.

Although less skilled readers perform poorly on tasks that require inference generation, it is difficult to know whether their performance results from deficits in inferential abilities or failure to encode accurate discourse representations. These experiments contrasted skilled and less skilled readers' ability (1) to execute a process necessary to represent the meaning of a discourse (i.e., to select the context-appropriate sense of an ambiguous word) and (2) to generate knowledge-based inferences. Ss read passages that contained homograph primes and responded to lexical decision targets. Both skilled and less skilled readers responded faster to appropriate than to inappropriate associates of homograph primes, whereas only skilled readers showed facilitation to topic-related words relative to unrelated control words. It is argued that deficiencies in basic linguistic processes alone cannot account for less skilled readers' failure to generate topic-related inferences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Re(de)fining the orthographic neighborhood: The role of addition and deletion neighbors in lexical decision and reading.

The influence of addition and deletion neighbors on visual word identification was investigated in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 used Spanish stimuli. In Experiment 1, lexical decision latencies were slower and less accurate for words and nonwords with higher-frequency deletion neighbors (e.g., jugar in juzgar), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 2 showed a similar interference effect for words and nonwords with higher-frequency addition neighbors (e.g., conejo, which has the addition neighbor consejo), relative to control stimuli. Experiment 3 replicated this addition neighbor interference effect in a lexical decision experiment with English stimuli. Across all three experiments, interference effects were always evident for addition/deletion neighbors with word-outer overlap, usually present for those with word-initial overlap, but never present for those with word-final overlap. Experiment 4 replicated the addition/deletion neighbor inhibitory effects in a Spanish sentence reading task in which the participants’ eye movements were monitored. These findings suggest that conventional orthographic neighborhood metrics should be redefined. In addition to its methodological implications, this conclusion has significant theoretical implications for input coding schemes and the mechanisms underlying word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)