Phonotactic Constraints Are Activated across Languages in Bilinguals

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism research
• Phonological processing

Background:

• Bilinguals activate both languages simultaneously during speech comprehension.
• It remains unclear if phonotactic constraints from a non-target language influence target language processing.
• Spanish phonotactics prohibit s+ consonant onsets, often leading to epenthesis (e.g., "estable").

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals access Spanish phonotactic constraints during English comprehension.
• To determine if phonotactic rules from an irrelevant language are activated during spoken language processing.

Main Methods:

• An English cross-modal priming lexical decision task was employed.
• Participants included Spanish-English bilinguals and English monolinguals.
• Stimuli involved English primes with and without s+ consonant onsets, followed by visual targets with or without the /e/ phonotactic constraint.

Main Results:

• Bilinguals showed faster responses to non-word targets with the /e/ phonotactic constraint when preceded by primes with s+ consonant onsets.
• This facilitation occurred for both cognate and non-cognate primes.
• Results confirm the activation of Spanish phonotactic constraints by English stimuli in bilinguals.

Conclusions:

• English primes containing s+ consonant onsets activated Spanish phonotactic constraints in bilinguals.
• Findings support models of parallel language activation in bilinguals.
• Phonotactic constraints from the irrelevant language are accessible during target language comprehension.