The devil is in the details of hand movement: Visualizing transposed-letter effects in bilingual minds

Research with native-speaking monolinguals demonstrates that orthographic coding during lexical access is flexible in terms of letter positioning. Evidence for this comes in part from the observation of priming from transposed-letter (TL) non-words (jugde/judge), which is assumed to arise from spread of activation throughout an orthographically-defined neighborhood. The present study tested the hypothesis that, for bilinguals, orthographic coding of letter position is influenced by cross-language lexical activation. TL non-words were created from English-Spanish cognates that differed in their degree of orthographic overlap as well as from non-cognates. In Experiment 1, these served as primes in a masked lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, they were presented as targets in a mouse-tracking lexical decision task. In both experiments Spanish-­English bilinguals’ lexical decision performance reflected greater TL priming for cognates relative to non-cognates and for cognates with more orthographic overlap relative to cognates with less orthographic overlap.