Interlingual lexical competition in a spoken sentence context: evidence from the visual world paradigm

We used the visual world paradigm to examine interlingual lexical competition when Dutch-English bilinguals listened to low-constraining sentences in their nonnative (L2; Experiment 1) and native (L1; Experiment 2) languages. Additionally, we investigated the influence of the degree of cross-lingual phonological similarity. When listening in L2, participants fixated more on competitor pictures of which the onset of the name was phonologically related to the onset of the name of the target in the nontarget language (e.g., fles, "bottle", given target flower) than on phonologically unrelated distractor pictures. Even when they listened in L1, this effect was also observed when the onsets of the names of the target picture (in L1) and the competitor picture (in L2) were phonologically very similar. These findings provide evidence for interlingual competition during the comprehension of spoken sentences, both in L2 and in L1.