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Article published In:
Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 9:2 (2019) ► pp.228–252

Covert co-activation of bilinguals’ non-target language

Phonological competition from translations

| Northwestern University
| Northwestern University

When listening to spoken language, bilinguals access words in both of their languages at the same time; this co-activation is often driven by phonological input mapping to candidates in multiple languages during online comprehension. Here, we examined whether cross-linguistic activation could occur covertly when the input does not overtly cue words in the non-target language. When asked in English to click an image of a duck, English-Spanish bilinguals looked more to an image of a shovel than to unrelated distractors, because the Spanish translations of the words duck and shovel (pato and pala, respectively) overlap phonologically in the non-target language. Our results suggest that bilinguals access their unused language, even in the absence of phonologically overlapping input. We conclude that during bilingual speech comprehension, words presented in a single language activate translation equivalents, with further spreading activation to unheard phonological competitors. These findings support highly interactive theories of language processing.

Keywords: language comprehension, language co-activation, bilingualism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The current study
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Materials
      • 3.2.1Visual stimuli
      • 3.2.2Auditory stimuli
    • 3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Data analysis and design
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Accuracy and reaction time
    • 4.2Time course analyses
      • 4.2.1Bilingual competition in English and Spanish
    • 4.3Cross-language competition
    • 4.4Overall fixation analyses
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.17022.sho
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