Please join us for the following talk in room G26, 7 George Square. The link to the online Teams meeting will be sent to the mailing list closer to the time for those who cannot join us in Edinburgh.

Speaker

Time and date

March 31st, 2 PM.

Title and abstract

Bilingual lexical access is assumed to be language non-selective – i.e., bilinguals co-activate L1 and L2 when reading in one language. However, it is still unclear whether the level of co-activation is similar between bilinguals who speak close languages, e.g., Dutch-English (Dijkstra et al., 1999), and bilinguals who speak distant languages, e.g., Japanese-English (Miwa et al., 2014).

As a first step towards addressing this issue, I have conducted a series of semantic relatedness tasks with different groups of bilinguals and trilinguals. I compared the extent to which language co-activation can be observed in the form of interlingual homograph interference in bilingual speakers of closer and more distant languages (Experiment 1: Spanish-English vs. Turkish-English, Experiment 2: Catalan-Spanish vs. Basque-Spanish) and trilingual speakers who speak closer and more distant L2/L3 (Experiment 3: Azeri-Turkish-English). Results showed that multilinguals experienced more co-activation between closer languages than between more distant languages – but these language distance effects were often modulated by L2 proficiency and differed across acquisition and linguistic contexts.

As a next step in my research, I am currently designing a visual lexical decision task to explore the cognate facilitation effect in L2 English speakers of (up to) 25 different L1s that vary in terms of their distance to English. If language distance influences language non-selectivity during word recognition, we would expect to find a larger cognate facilitation effect in bilinguals of closer languages than bilinguals of more distant languages, all other things being equal.

An overview of the experimental design will be provided to explore its feasibility and how to avoid confounding presence of L1-L2 cognates and language distance. Operationalisation and relevance of additional variables (e.g., cognateness, psychotypology) will be discussed. The findings from this experiment could hopefully provide a broader picture as to whether, how, and to what extent language distance affects how bilinguals access words when reading in one language.

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