Visual Word Recognition in Multilinguals

Abstract

This chapter on the reading of words by multilinguals considers how retrieving words in two or more languages is affected by the lexical properties of the words, the sentence context in which they occur, and the language to which they belong. Reaction time and event-related potential (ERP) studies are discussed that investigate the processing of cognates, interlingual homographs, and words with different numbers of neighbors, both in isolation and in sentence context. After reviewing different models for multilingual word retrieval, it is concluded that multilingual word recognition involves a language-independent, context-sensitive, and interactive pattern recognition routine, with temporal properties that can be determined not only by “classical” reaction time techniques, but even better by up-to-date research techniques such as eye-tracking and ERP recordings.

Neural Evidence of Language Membership Control in Bilingual Word Recognition: An fMRI Study of Cognate Processing in Chinese–Japanese Bilinguals

“…Therefore, the [IH > CO] contrast may further elucidate the cognitive demands of stimulus conflict resolution (i.e., semantic representations) between two cross-linguistic word types. Furthermore, the task decision system may be affected by contextual information (e.g., stimulus list composition) and eliminate the link between responses and representations of the non-target language during IH recognition (see Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2018 for a review).…”

“…The cognitive mechanism underlying cognate processing appears to be sensitive to whether the stimuli list comprises the bilinguals’ two languages and has not yet been fully proven by behavioral and neuroimaging studies. According to context-sensitive lexical access (see Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2018 for a review), lexicons in two languages are simultaneously accessed, and contextual information allows bilinguals to select an appropriate response to a given context during word recognition (e.g., stimulus list composition). The cognate facilitation effect was mainly observed from single language stimulus list composed of cognates and matched control words from bilinguals’ first (L1) or second language (L2) only (e.g., Peeters et al, 2013 ; Xiong et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Because no word belongs to any language other than the target language, any lexical activation may be regarded as evidence supporting facilitation in word recognition ( Vanlangendonck et al, 2020 ). In contrast, according to context-sensitive lexical access, the composition of the stimulus list could influence participants’ language processing ( Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2018 ). The awareness of language memberships may be enhanced by mixed-language stimulus list composition , including words from bilinguals’ two languages (e.g., mixing cognates, bilinguals’ L1 and L2).…”

Modulation of Cross-Language Activation During Bilingual Auditory Word Recognition: Effects of Language Experience but Not Competing Background Noise

“…While the majority of evidence for cross-language activation in bilingual language processing comes from studies of visual word recognition (see Dijkstra and van Heuven, 2018 , for a recent review), there is also considerable evidence that bilinguals experience cross-language activation in the auditory modality. Many studies in this vein have employed the visual world paradigm, often finding that bilingual listeners are more likely to look at an interlingual distractor picture (e.g., a duck—Spanish pato —when the target word is English “pot”) as compared to unrelated distractor pictures ( Spivey and Marian, 1999 ; Marian and Spivey, 2003 ).…”

Do both WRAP and TRAP inhibit the recognition of the French word DRAP? Impact of orthographic markedness on cross-language orthographic priming

“…A widespread view in the field of bilingual visual word recognition considers that lexical access is language non-selective, meaning that written word forms of both languages are automatically coactivated during word reading (see reviews by Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2018; Kroll et al, 2016). This hypothesis is supported by evidence of lexical competition effects between cross-language orthographic neighbour words such as fire — rire (laugh) in the English/French language pair (Bijeljac-Babic et al, 1997; Dijkstra et al, 2010; Dirix et al, 2017; Experiment 1; Grossi et al, 2012; Midgley et al, 2008; Van Heuven et al, 1998), a mechanism that is therefore implemented in several models such as the Bilingual Interactive Activation model (BIA, Van Heuven et al, 1998), and its extension BIA+ (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002).…”