The role of language distance in bilingual lexical processing

There is ample evidence for language non-selective lexical access, i.e., bilinguals experience language co-activation even when reading in a one-language context¹. Still, most evidence stems from bilinguals who speak close languages, e.g., Dutch-English^2-4, and it is unclear how generalisable this finding is across different types of bilinguals. Previous research has suggested that bilinguals of distant languages may be less prone to experience language co-activation than bilinguals of close languages⁵.

To address this issue, this research examines the effect of language distance in bilinguals on their language-selectivity during word recognition in an L2 context. Two comparisons were carried out: (1) Turkish-English (distant) and Spanish-English (close) bilinguals, and (2) Basque-Spanish (distant) and Catalan-Spanish (close) bilinguals. This will enable comparison of late bilinguals from monolingual societies/communities (Study 1) and early bilinguals from bilingual societies/communities (Study 2).

Participants completed L2 semantic relatedness tasks, deciding whether two words are related to each other in meaning. Critical items include interlingual homographs (IHs) – words with the same spelling but different meanings across languages (e.g., pie in English and Spanish, meaning foot). IHs were presented with words related to their L1 meaning (e.g., toe-pie) or unrelated words (e.g., pie-eve) matched in frequency, orthographic length and number of syllables.

Cross-language activation should give rise to interference from the L1 meaning of IHs, leading to lower accuracy and longer latency for L1-related IHs compared to unrelated IHs. Bilinguals of close languages were expected to experience more cross-language activation than bilinguals of distant languages.

Data collection is in process, with preliminary data available for Studies 1 and 2. I will present available data, which suggests that both bilinguals of close and distant languages experience cross-language activation when encountering IHs presented with an L1-related L2 word. Early and late bilinguals from monolingual and bilingual societies/communities with differing levels of proficiency and age of acquisition (AoA) seem to experience language co-activation to different extents and levels. Moreover, improvements in L2 proficiency might modulate language co-activation differently depending on a bilinguals’ L1-L2 distance. This work highlights the importance of measuring language distance and accounting for its interaction with key factors influencing bilingual language processing (e.g., AoA, L2 proficiency and use, task demands).

References

¹ Dijkstra, T., & Van Heuven, W. J. B. (2002). The architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5(3), 175–197. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1366728902003012.

²Lemhöfer, K., & Dijkstra, T. (2004). Recognizing cognates and interlingual homographs: Effects of code similarity in language-specific and generalized lexical decision. Memory & Cognition, 32(4), 533–550. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195845.

³van Heuven, W. J. B., Schriefers, H., Dijkstra, T., & Hagoort, P. (2008). Language Conflict in the Bilingual Brain. Cerebral Cortex, 18(11), 2706–2716. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhn030

⁴Dijkstra, T., Miwa, K., Brummelhuis, B., Sappelli, M., & Baayen, H. (2010). How cross-language similarity and task demands affect cognate recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 62(3), 284–301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2009.12.003.

⁵Cenoz, J. (2003). The Role of Typology in the Organization of the Multilingual Lexicon. In J. Cenoz, B. Hufeisen, & U. Jessner (Eds.), The Multilingual Lexicon (pp. 103–116). Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-306-48367-7_8.

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