title: Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: evidence for nonselective lexical access.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium. wouter.duyck@UGent.be
authors.forename: Wouter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Duyck
authors.forename: Eva Van
authors.initials: EV
authors.lastname: Assche
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Drieghe
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Hartsuiker
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior; D006801:Humans; D019303:Multilingualism; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary