Noise Modulates Crosslinguistic Effects on Second-Language Auditory Word Recognition

This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy).

In an online experiment, a group of Spanish-English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords were either presented in the clear or were embedded in white auditory noise. Target words were varied in the degree to which they overlapped in their phonological form with their translation equivalents and were categorized according to their overlap as cognates (form and meaning) or noncognates (meaning only). In order to test for effects of crosslinguistic competition, the phonological neighborhood density of the targets' translations was also manipulated.

The results show that crosslinguistic effects are impacted by noise; when the translation had a high neighborhood density, performance was worse for cognates than for noncognates, especially in noise.

The findings suggest that noise increases lexical competition across languages, as it does within a language, and that the crosslinguistic phonological overlap for cognates compared with noncognates can further increase the pool of competitors by co-activating crosslinguistic lexical candidates. The results are discussed within the context of the bilingual word recognition literature and models of language and bilingual lexical processing.