title: Tip-of-the-tongue in a second language: the effects of brief first-language exposure and long-term use.
abstract: Bilinguals have more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) incidents than monolinguals. Whereas previous research has focused on differences in the long term language experience between these groups, the present study examined the hypothesis that both long-term and transient context factors modulate TOT rates. Russian-Hebrew bilinguals who acquired Hebrew either early (<5years) or late (>11years) were compared to native Hebrew speakers on a picture naming task in Hebrew, before and after viewing a short movie in Russian. Both the short-term context (before-after the movie) and long-term language experience modulated TOT rates: Late bilinguals exhibited significantly higher TOT rates than early bilinguals who did not significantly differ from native Hebrew speakers. Critically, following the Russian movie, bilinguals in both groups differed from the native speakers of the target language. Thus, exposure to the non-target language exerted a global, non-item-specific, cross-language interference effect. The findings highlight the dynamic nature of the bilingual system in which both short and long-term language experience operate to influence bilingual performance.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, Haifa University, Israel; Linguistic Cognition Lab, Ruppin Academic Center, Israel. Electronic address: hamutalk@ruppin.ac.il.
authors.forename: Hamutal
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kreiner
authors.affiliation: Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, Haifa University, Israel.
authors.forename: Tamar
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Degani
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D013060:Speech; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Bilingualism; Cross-language influences; Language production; Lexical access; Tip-of-the-tongue