Visual recognition of identical cognates involves sublexical inhibition and lexical facilitation

The study investigated the consequences of cross-language activation on the time course of bilingual word recognition. Twenty-two Spanish-English bilinguals and 21 English monolingual controls decided whether visually presented letter strings were English words, while behavioral and event-related potential responses were recorded. The language status of words was manipulated experimentally, such that words were either identical cognates between English and Spanish (e.g. CLUB) or noncognates (e.g. CLOCK). Participants were equally fast in responding to cognate and noncognate words. Bilinguals were more accurate in responding to cognates, whereas monolinguals exhibited higher accuracy in response to noncognates. Critically, bilinguals produced larger P200 followed by smaller N400 responses to cognates than noncognates, whereas monolinguals showed a pattern of reduced N400 responses to cognates. The results of the current study indicate that cross-language activation may not only result in lexical facilitation (indexed by a reduction of the N400 response to cognates) as a result of shared form-meaning associations across languages but also in sublexical inhibition (indexed by a larger P200 response to cognates) as a consequence of cross-language competition among phonological forms. Results support the language-nonselective view of bilingual lexical access and suggest that while lexical facilitation for identical cognates may be observed at most levels of second language proficiency, sublexical inhibition in response to identical cognates may be a marker of advanced levels of proficiency.