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Updated: Oct 29, 2025

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
Bilingualism and Rapid Automatized Naming: effects of language switching on lexical access and reading speed
Esther Simonato1, Anne Taffin d'Heursel Baldisseri1, Clara Regina Brandão de Avila1
1Escola Paulista de Medicina, Universidade Federal de São Paulo - UNIFESP - São Paulo (SP), Brasil.
Purpose:
To assess whether bilingualism, on a language switching experiment, is associated with higher or lower accuracy and speed of the rapid automatized naming of objects and investigate the influence of language switching on reading speed.
Methods:
The performance of 50 Brazilian bilingual children in the Rapid Automatized Naming Task, whose L1 was Brazilian Portuguese and who were exposed to English daily at school, was assessed. Forty-seven monolingual (Brazilian Portuguese) children were grouped according to age.
Results:
Language switching interfered with the performance of the bilingual children in the Rapid Automatized Naming Task in terms of speed and accuracy. No correlations were found between the performance in the RAN task and Reading Speed.
Conclusion:
Brazilian bilingual students showed poor performance in the rapid naming task on the switch trial when compared to monolingual students, showing higher rates of mistakes, especially hesitations. Only the performance of bilingual students in the rapid naming task in L2 correlated with L1 reading speed.
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