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Related Experiment Videos

Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression.

Matthew Finkbeiner1, Jorge Almeida, Niels Janssen

  • 1Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. msf@wjh.harvard.edu

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|August 30, 2006
PubMed
Summary

Bilinguals do not suppress words in their non-target language during lexical selection. This finding challenges the language suppression hypothesis, which proposed that suppressing non-target words resolves competition in bilingual language processing.

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Cognitive Science
  • Bilingualism Research

Background:

  • The
  • hard problem
  • in bilingual lexical access occurs when translation-equivalent words activate equally, causing competition.
  • The language suppression hypothesis posits that suppressing non-target language representations resolves this competition.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To test the prediction of the language suppression hypothesis regarding lexical selection time on language switch trials.
  • To investigate whether non-target lexical representations are suppressed in bilinguals.

Main Methods:

  • Participants named pictures in their dominant language on both language switch and non-switch trials.
  • Reaction times for picture naming were measured and compared between trial types.

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Main Results:

  • Picture naming times were not significantly longer on language switch trials compared to non-switch trials.
  • This indicates that representations in the non-target language were not suppressed.

Conclusions:

  • The findings contradict the prediction of the language suppression hypothesis.
  • The results suggest that non-target lexical representations are not suppressed during bilingual lexical access.
  • The study questions the viability of the language suppression hypothesis as a solution to the
  • hard problem
  • in bilingualism.