Bilingual lexical access

With the occurrence of widespread computational modeling, researchers extended the theoretical approaches for the studies of bilingual lexical access.

Computational models are also able to generate new testable hypotheses and allow researchers to manipulate conditions which might not be possible in normal experiments.

[7] For example, researchers can investigate and simulate the lexical access systems under various states of damage without using aphasic subjects.

[15] One interpretation is that bilinguals initially make a decision about the language of the word and then activate the appropriate language-selected lexicon.

The later lexical competition can also be used to explain why bilinguals spend more time understanding passages in mixed languages.

Researchers used those types of stimuli to investigate if bilinguals process them in the same way as the matched control words which occur only in one language.

If the reaction time (RT) of interlingual homographs is the same as the controlled monolingual word, then it supports the language-selective access hypothesis.

If RT is significantly different for interlingual homographs than for the controlled monolingual word, it supports the language-nonselective access hypothesis.

[1] It implies that when a bilingual encounters a spoken or written word, the activation happens in parallel in both contextually appropriate and inappropriate linguistic subsystems.

For example, Dijkstra, van Jaarsveld and Brinke[26] used an English lexical decision task for Dutch–English bilinguals on a list of a cognate, homographs, and English-control words.

Later, De Moor[12] repeated the English lexical decision study by Dijkstra et al.[26] and found that the Dutch meaning of the interlingual homographs was also activated by English–Dutch bilinguals.

De Moor found there was a small but significant translation priming effect for subsequent English translation trials; it suggested that the lexical information of the Dutch word form was also activated, even though it did not affect the reaction time of the previous homographic trial.

[citation needed] Cross-linguistic influence can be understood as the various ways that two or more languages relate in the mind and affect a person's linguistic performance or development.

Cross-linguistic effects of orthographic and semantic overlap between different languages of cognates and interlingual homographs were also reported in many priming studies.

For example, Beauvillain and Grainger[27] had French–English bilinguals make English lexical decisions on target strings primed by French words, which was told to the participants.

In later studies, researchers masked the briefly presented prime words to prevent participants from using conscious strategies.

For instance, Sáchez-Casas et al.[28] used Spanish–English bilinguals in a semantic categorization task on Spanish target words.

Most current models in word recognition assume that bilingual lexical access is nonselective, which also take into account the demands of task and context-dependence of processing.

Research done by Déprez (1994) has shown that mixed utterances in children are not limited to the lexical level but also in the areas of morphology, syntax, and pronunciation.

Researchers also began to investigate the cognitive nature of bilingual lexical access in context by examining word recognition in sentences.

[44][45] In sentence processing, a number of online measuring techniques are exploited to detect cognitive activity at the very moment it takes place or only slightly after.

In their study, German–English bilinguals were presented with relatively low-constraint sentences in which a homograph (e.g., "The woman gave her friend a pretty GIFT"; "gift" means poison in German) or a control word was presented at the end (e.g., The woman gave her friend a pretty SHELL).

[49] Schwartz and Kroll[44] used cognates and homographs as target words presented in low- and high-constraint sentences to Spanish–English bilinguals.

They investigated word presentation and the semantic constraint modulated language lexical access in bilinguals.

No homograph effects were found, but less proficient bilinguals made more naming errors, particularly in low-constraint sentences.

They observed cognate facilitation (nonselective bilingual lexical access) in low-constraint sentences, but not in high-constraint ones.

They also concluded that the semantic constraint provided by a sentence can attenuate cross-language activation at later reading stages.