Bilingual lexical access during L1 sentence reading: The effects of L2 knowledge, semantic constraint, and L1–L2 intermixing.

Abstract

Libben and Titone (2009) recently observed that cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference were attenuated by increased semantic constraint during bilingual second language (L2) reading, using eye movement measures. We now investigate whether cross-language activation also occurs during first language (L1) reading as a function of age of L2 acquisition and task demands (i.e., inclusion of L2 sentences). In Experiment 1, participants read high and low constraint English (L1) sentences containing interlingual homographs, cognates, or control words. In Experiment 2, we included French (L2) filler sentences to increase salience of the L2 during L1 reading. The results suggest that bilinguals reading in their L1 show nonselective activation to the extent that they acquired their L2 early in life. Similar to our previous work on L2 reading, high contextual constraint attenuated cross-language activation for cognates. The inclusion of French filler items promoted greater cross-language activation, especially for late stage reading measures. Thus, L1 bilingual reading is modulated by L2 knowledge, semantic constraint, and task demands.

Another cup of TEE? The processing of second language near-cognates in first language reading

“…These results are in line with the earlier findings of a co-activation of the L2 readings of cognates during L1 reading as observed in the word data of eye movement studies (Cop et al, 2017;Titone et al, 2011;van Assche et al, 2009). First, the fact that DS speakers read nearcognates spelled in the Dutch way faster than "nonDutch" misspellings (pseudohomophones) indicates that Dutch word knowledge played a role in this reading task, even though only German (L1) sentences were being read.…”

“…At the same time, it is at odds with the studies that did succeed in finding cognate effects in L1 reading, though with usually many more data points than we had (Cop et al, 2017;Titone et al, 2011;van Assche et al, 2009). We will return to this issue in the General Discussion.…”

“…A facilitatory effect could have been expected on the basis of earlier observations of such cognate effects in L1 sentence reading (Cop et al, 2017;Titone et al, 2011;van Assche et al, 2009); however, it has to be kept in mind that these effects were very small and only observed with large data sets, and mostly obtained with identical cognates. In contrast, an inhibitory effect would also have been possible here as a result of confusion between German and Dutch spellings in this situation with Dutch words as nonword foils, similar to what has been shown for a language decision task (Dijkstra et al, 2010).…”

“…van Assche, Duyck, Hartsuiker, and Diependaele (2009) found that (identical and non-identical) cognates embedded in Dutch sentences read by Dutch-English bilinguals yielded first fixation durations that were 5 ms shorter than those for control words; the effects for gaze and regression path durations were 8 and 10 ms, respectively, and became significant only with (despite multiple comparisons on interdependent measures) non-corrected p-levels of .05 and extremely large degrees of freedom (due to analyses on nonaggregated data). Titone, Libben, Mercier, Whitford, and Pivneva (2011) found cognate facilitation effects of similar sizes in English-French bilinguals reading English sentences, but these occurred only in low-constraint sentences (i.e. when the target was not predictable) and, in the case of early measures, only for bilinguals who acquired their L2 during childhood.…”

“…First of all, it has to be kept in mind that there have been failures to find such L2 cognate effects in L1 word recognition before (Caramazza & Brones, 1979;de Groot et al, 2002), and that those previous studies that did find such (descriptively very small) effects most often used identical cognates and large numbers of data points (Cop et al, 2017;Titone et al, 2011;van Assche et al, 2009). Here, because the cognate effect in the words was not our primary research question, we had a restricted number of orthographically non-identical cognates and a restricted number of participants, which might not have been sufficient to let the cognate effect surface.…”