Factors modulating cross-linguistic co-activation in bilinguals

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism Research
• Phonetics and Phonology

Background:

• Bilinguals often activate both languages simultaneously during auditory word recognition.
• The precise mechanism driving this parallel activation, particularly the role of phonetic vs. phonemic information, remains debated.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether cross-linguistic co-activation in bilinguals is driven by shared phonetic features or by shared phonemic categories.
• To compare the effects of phonemic matching versus phonetic matching on cross-linguistic activation in Spanish-English bilinguals.

Main Methods:

• Utilized eye-tracking technology within a visual world paradigm to measure spoken word recognition.
• Presented participants with stimuli manipulating phonemic (e.g., English /b/ vs. Spanish /b/) and phonetic (e.g., English /b/ vs. Spanish /p/) similarity between languages.
• Assessed cross-linguistic co-activation in both native (L1) and second language (L2) Spanish speakers.

Main Results:

• Phonemic matching between English and Spanish sounds (e.g., /b/ to /b/) reliably induced cross-linguistic co-activation in both L1 and L2 Spanish speakers.
• Phonetic matching that did not involve phonemic overlap (e.g., English /b/ to Spanish /p/) did not elicit significant co-activation.
• The degree of co-activation was dependent on the phonemic relationship between the languages.

Conclusions:

• Cross-linguistic co-activation in bilinguals appears to be primarily based on the activation of abstract phonemic categories.
• Phonetic detail, despite its importance in speech perception, may play a less direct role in triggering activation of a non-target language.
• These findings contribute to understanding the cognitive architecture of bilingual language processing.