Does bilingualism hamper lexical access in speech production?

Frequency Drives Lexical Access in Reading but not in Speaking: The Frequency-Lag Hypothesis

“…Two previous picture naming studies compared frequency effects between monolinguals and bilinguals in their dominant language, and within bilinguals between their dominant and nondominant languages. In both cases bilinguals exhibited a larger frequency effect than Lexical access in speaking versus reading 24 monolinguals when tested in their dominant language (Gollan et al, 2008;Ivanova & Costa, 2008). However, in one study (Gollan et al, 2008), as in Experiment 1, frequency effects were also larger in the nondominant than in the dominant language, whereas in the other study (Ivanova & Costa, 2008) frequency effects were equally large in the bilinguals' two languages.…”

“…By virtue of using each language only part of the time, bilinguals have used word forms particular to each language relatively less frequently than monolinguals -i.e., bilingualism entails a frequency-lag (Gollan & Silverberg, 2001;Gollan et al, 2002;Gollan et al, 2005;Gollan, Montoya, Cera, & Sandoval, 2008;Sandoval, Gollan, Ferreira, & Salmon, 2010; for similar ideas see Ivanova & Costa, 2008;Lehtonen, & Laine, 2003;Mägiste, 1979;Nicoladis, Palmer, & Marentette, 2007;Pearson et al, 1997;Ransdell & Fischler, 1987). Supporting this account, the bilingual disadvantage is especially large for retrieval of low-frequency words, whereas little or no bilingual disadvantage is found for production of high-frequency words.…”

Emotionality in a second language: It's a matter of time

“…These studies consistently report a bilingual disadvantage for naming, with proficient bilingual participants naming pictures significantly more slowly in their non dominant language (either L1 or L2 Gollan et al, 2005) as compared to monolinguals. In one study, slower naming has been demonstrated even for the first/dominant language of the bilingual speakers when compared with monolingual speakers (Ivanova & Costa, 2008). These results were explained in terms of interference between the two languages (Kroll et al, 2006;Sandoval et al, 2010).…”

Neuroscience and education: prime time to build the bridge

“…However, this effect vanishes when vocabulary is aggregated for bilinguals across both languages 50 . Bilingualism also consistently causes a linguistic disadvantage in lexical access even for bilinguals' first and dominant language 51 .…”