The second language interferes with picture naming in the first language: evidence for L2 activation during L1 production

Abstract

Previous research has shown that when speakers produce words in their second language (L2), they also activate the phonological form of the translation of the word in their first language (L1). Here we investigated whether this holds in the opposite direction, i.e. when participants speak in exclusively in their L1. In a picture-word interference task, speakers named pictures in their L1 Dutch ("mes" [knife]) while ignoring L2 English auditory distractors phonologically related to the English translation of the target ("knight") or unrelated ("plane"). Naming latencies were longer in the related compared to the unrelated condition, suggesting that the L2 translations were activated up to the phonological level. However, this pattern was only obtained when speakers were addressed in the target language (Dutch) throughout the experiment. Moreover, the size of this effect did not depend on individual L2 proficiency. We conclude that co-activation of two languages is not restricted to the dominant language.ARTICLE HISTORY

Modeling color naming in bilinguals: Computational mechanisms of crosslinguistic influence

“…On the other hand, lexical coactivation in combination with initial transfer and (crucially) without conceptual updating achieves the second best results after our best model (about 70% of the performance of conceptual updating plus initial transfer). This is consistent with the ample evidence that crosslinguistic lexical activation occurs in bilingual speakers, and that it affects the reaction times in various naming tasks (Colomé & Miozzo, 2010;Klaus, Lemhöfer, & Schriefers, 2018;Macizo, 2016;Spalek, Hoshino, Wu, Damian, & Thierry, 2014;Von Holzen & Mani, 2014, etc.). Notably, in the case of Navajo and English color words, translation equivalence is at best incomplete, such that one-to-many and/or many-to-one crosslinguistic connections may be necessary to capture the relationships across terms in the languages.…”

A Review on Language Control of Bilingual Speech Production in Language Switching

“…At present, the language-switching paradigm (e.g., Declerck et al, 2012;Declerck et al, 2017;Zheng et al, 2018;Zheng et al, 2020), picture-word interference task (e.g., Hermans et al, 1998;Costa et al, 2000;Boukadi et al 2016;Klaus & Lemhöfer, 2018) and read aloud task (e.g., Li & Gollan, 2018;Schotter et al, 2019) are mainly used in the behavioral study of bilingual language production. In this section, an explanatory introduction and comment will be made to illustrate the language-switching paradigm.…”

Language selection contributes to intrusion errors in speaking: Evidence from picture naming

“…As discussed so far, language intrusion takes place in daily life – though not very frequently (Muysken, 2000; Poulisse, 1999) – as well as in laboratory experiments, such as in the picture-word interference task (Boukadi et al, 2015; Hermans et al, 1998; Klaus et al, 2018), the cued language-switching task (Meuter & Allport, 1999; Zheng et al, 2018a; Zheng et al, 2018b), and the reading aloud task (Gollan & Goldrick, 2018; Gollan et al, 2014; Li & Gollan, 2018; Schotter et al, 2019). Studying why intrusion errors happen can help us better understand how bilinguals exert control over the bilingual word production system.…”

“…When distractors are words from the nontarget language (e.g., a Dutch word berm ) that phonologically overlap with the picture name in the nontarget language (e.g., berg , the Dutch word for mountain), they slow down naming response time (RT) and increase error rates (the so-called “phono-translation effect”). The interference is not only observed for distractors from the more dominant first language (L1) during naming in the less dominant second language (L2) (Boukadi et al, 2015; Hermans et al, 1998), but also the other way around (Klaus, Lemhöfer & Schriefers, 2018). In these picture-word interference studies with phono-translation distractors, intrusion errors are occasionally observed (in the current example, saying the Dutch word berg instead of the target English word mountain ), although not frequently.…”