1887
Volume 9, Issue 2
  • ISSN 1879-9264
  • E-ISSN: 1879-9272
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Abstract

Abstract

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 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 ( and , 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.

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/content/journals/10.1075/lab.17022.sho
2017-11-06
2025-02-08
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): bilingualism; language co-activation; language comprehension
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