French-English bilinguals were presented with four tests on a Brown-Peterson distractor task with spoken pairs of CVCs which varied in language of pronunciation and meaningfulness. On the fourth test, three of the four groups received a shift along one or both of these dimensions. Significantly increased recall was obtained following the language shift, the meaningfulness shift and their combination. Subsequent analysis, however, revealed that the increase in recall occurred only when high meaningful CVCs were presented on the shift trials. The results were interpreted as showing that release from proactive inhibition as a function of a language shift in bilinguals can be explained through the hypothesis of separate phonological systems and does not require the postulation of separate semantic reference systems.
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