Two picture-word interference experiments were conducted to investigate whether or not words from a first and more dominant language are activated during lexical access in a foreign and less dominant language. Native speakers of Dutch were instructed to name pictures in their foreign language English. Our experiments show that the Dutch name of a picture is activated during initial stages of the process of lexical in English as a foreign language. We conclude that bilingual speakers cannot suppress activation from their first language while naming pictures in a foreign language. The implications for bilingual speech production theories are discussed.

In recent years, multiple studies have shown that the languages of a bilingual interact during processing. We investigated sign activation as deaf children read words. In a word–picture verification task, we manipulated the underlying sign equivalents. We presented children with word–picture pairs for which the sign translation equivalents varied with respect to sign phonology overlap (i.e., handshape, movement, hand-palm orientation, and location) and sign iconicity (i.e., transparent depiction of meaning or not). For the deaf children, non-matching word–picture pairs with sign translation equivalents that had highly similar elements (i.e., strong sign phonological relations) showed relatively longer response latencies and more errors than non-matching word–picture pairs without sign phonological relations (inhibitory effects). In contrast, matching word–picture pairs with strongly iconic sign translation equivalents showed relatively shorter response latencies and fewer errors than pairs with weakly iconic translation equivalents (facilitatory effects). No such activation effects were found in the word–picture verification task for the hearing children. The results provide evidence for interactive cross-language processing in deaf children.

This paper reports on one experiment in which we investigated the relationship between reading and signing skills. We administered a vocabulary task and a story comprehension task in Sign Language of the Netherlands and in written Dutch to a group of 87 deaf children from bilingual education programs. We found a strong and positive correlation between the scores obtained in the sign vocabulary task and the reading vocabulary task when age, short-term memory scores, and nonverbal intelligence scores were controlled for. In addition, a correlation was observed between the scores in the story comprehension tasks in Sign Language of the Netherlands and written Dutch but only when vocabulary scores for words and signs were not taken into account. The results are briefly discussed with reference to a model we recently proposed to describe lexical development for deaf children in bilingual education programs (Hermans, D., Knoors, H., Ormel, E., & Verhoeven, L., 2008). In addition, the implications of the results of the present study for previous studies on the relationship between reading and signing skills are discussed.

In this paper the between-language identity facilitation effect reported by Costa, Miozzo, and Caramazza (1999) was re-examined. found that bilinguals name pictures accompanied by the picture's names in a language not required for production faster than pictures accompanied by unrelated words. The between-language identity facilitation effect has been taken as evidence in favor of language-specific models of lexical access . I report one pictureword interference experiment that shows that between-language identity facilitation can no longer be taken as evidence in favor of either languagespecific or language-nonspecific models of lexical access.