Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading.

Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French–English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic transparency in the processing of compounds: consequences for representation, processing, and impairment

The role of semantic transparency in morphological processing in general and in compound processing in particular is examined. It is argued that the notion of semantic transparency is crucial to an account of how compounds are represented and processed in the mind. A sketch of a model is proposed in which compound processing is described in terms of stimulus properties, lexical properties, and conceptual properties. The model represents the notion of semantic transparency in terms of a four-way classification of the semantic relationship between a compound's constituents and the corresponding independent morphemes. It also distinguishes between semantically componential and noncomponential compounds. It is proposed that the model offers a framework within which experimental psycholinguistic findings can be understood and within which aphasic deficits associated with compound processing can be characterized. As an example of this, the paper presents a reanalysis of an aphasic patient who exhibits the tendency to interpret semantically opaque compounds as though they were transparent and to interpret opaque compounds in terms of a blend of constituent and whole-word meaning. It is argued that the underlying deficit in this patient is the failure for inhibition to result from the competition among stimuli at the conceptual level of representation.