Markedness effects in Norwegian–English bilinguals: Task-dependent use of language-specific letters and bigrams

Abstract

This study investigates how bilinguals use sublexical language membership information to speed up their word recognition process in different task situations. Norwegian-English bilinguals performed a Norwegian-English language decision task, a mixed English lexical decision task, or a mixed Norwegian lexical decision task. The mixed lexical decision experiments included words from the nontarget language that required a "no" response. The language specificity of the Bokmål (a Norwegian written norm) and English (non)words was varied by including language-specific letters ("smør", "hawk") or bigrams ("dusj", "veal"). Bilinguals were found to use both types of sublexical markedness to facilitate their decisions, language-specific letters leading to larger effects than language-specific bigrams. A cross-experimental comparison indicates that the use of sublexical language information was strategically dependent on the task at hand and that decisions were based on language membership information derived directly from sublexical (bigram) stimulus characteristics instead of indirectly via their lexical representations. Available models for bilingual word recognition fail to handle the observed marker effects, because all consider language membership as a lexical property only.

Lexical organization of language-ambiguous and language-specific words in bilinguals

“…In this line, studies using non-words with different degrees of cross-linguistic similarity in their orthographic structure have shown that this factor highly determines how fast and accurately bilingual participants will reject them in lexical decision tasks (e.g., Lemhöfer & Dijkstra, 2004;Lemhöfer & Radach, 2009). While the evidence in this regard is still scarce, the studies testing the impact of orthographic markedness in bilingual visual word processing with bilingual readers whose languages share the same alphabet have demonstrated the importance of sub-lexical orthographic cues (see Casaponsa, Carreiras and Duñabeitia, 2014;Vaid and Frenck-Mestre, 2002;Van 4 Kesteren, Dijkstra, and de Smedt, 2012). The purpose of the present study is to explore whether cross-linguistic orthographic regularities constrain the access to language-specific orthographic and lexical representations in seemingly monolingual language contexts (i.e., single-language tasks).…”

“…Previous studies have shown that bilinguals are highly sensitive to the statistical regularities of words in their two languages and that they use this information in an automatic fashion while reading (see Casaponsa et al, 2014;Vaid & Frenck-Mestre, 2002;Van Kesteren et al, 2012, among others). It thus seems that bilingual readers whose languages share the same script develop fine-grained sensitivity to language-specific sub-lexical information, and that orthotactic cues lead to a different organization of lexical semantic representations for orthographically marked and unmarked words.…”

“…The effects associated with the processing of orthographically marked words (e.g., the Basque word "neska", meaning "girl"; note that "sk" is an implausible bigram in Spanish) suggest that these items are assigned language membership at visuo-orthographic stages of processing in language identification tasks, and that their degree of cross-language competition is partially reduced in tasks requiring lexical access (see Casaponsa et al, 2014;Van Kesteren et al, 2012). In contrast, the effects associated with the processing of orthographically unmarked words (e.g., the Basque word "mutil", meaning "boy"; note that the word "mutil" is orthographically legal in Spanish), suggest that these items are prone to a high degree of cross-language interference, thus leading to delayed language recognition and more effortful lexical access (see Casaponsa et al2014;Vaid & Frenck-Mestre, 2002;Van Kesteren et al 2012). Hence, cross-linguistic orthographic regularities may constrain access to languagespecific orthographic and lexical representations (i.e., enable language-selective lexical access) in the presence of orthographically distinctive sub-lexical units.…”

“…Lemhöfer, Koester and Schreuder (2011) further demonstrated the importance of orthotactic cues in bilingual visual word processing by showing that bilinguals (as well as monolinguals) are highly sensitive to the frequency and legality of the bigrams at the morphemic boundary of compound words, and that they use this piece of information to process morphologically complex words. Van Kesteren, Dijkstra, and de Smedt (2012) showed that Norwegian-English bilinguals strongly rely on sub-lexical orthographic cues such as cross-language bigram legality to access language membership and accomplish lexical access. Bilinguals responded to orthographically marked and unmarked Norwegian and English words differently in a series of lexical decision and language identification tasks, and the authors concluded that orthographic markedness aids language membership identification.…”

“…In the same vein, Orfanidou and Sumner (2005) showed that language-specific orthographic cues reduce the potential interference from lexical representations of a non-target language (see also Gonzales &Lotto, 2013, andJu &Luce, 2004, for evidence from spoken word recognition), while words with language nonselective sub-lexical units yield greater co-activation of the two languages. For instance, in the absence of language-specific sub-lexical cues, non-balanced bilingual participants take longer to reject words from their non-native language when completing a lexical decision task in their native language (e.g., Van Kesteren et al, 2012), and both balanced and non-balanced bilinguals struggle with perceptual identification of unmarked words more than marked words, possibly due to the enhanced parallel activation of competing items in the non-target language (e.g., Casaponsa et al, 2014).…”