Bimodal bilinguals co-activate both languages during spoken comprehension

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Bilingualism Research

Background:

• Bilinguals typically exhibit parallel activation of their two languages.
• This parallel activation is often linked to shared input structures between languages.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate parallel language activation in bimodal bilinguals using American Sign Language (ASL) and English.
• To determine if languages without input overlap and with distinct phonological systems activate in parallel.

Main Methods:

• Utilized a visual world paradigm with eye-tracking to record hearing ASL-English bimodal bilinguals and English monolinguals.
• Participants were instructed in English to select objects from a display.
• Critical trials featured target items with competitors that overlapped in ASL phonology.

Main Results:

• Bimodal bilinguals fixated more on ASL phonologically related competitors compared to unrelated items.
• Bimodal bilinguals showed greater attention to competitors relative to monolinguals.
• This indicates concurrent activation of ASL during spoken English comprehension.

Conclusions:

• Language co-activation is not specific to a single modality (e.g., spoken or signed).
• Findings provide insights into cross-modal language co-activation mechanisms in bimodal bilinguals.
• Suggests the role of neural connections in processing multiple languages across modalities.