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Masked orthographic priming in bilingual word recognition
R Bijeljac-Babic1, A Biardeau, J Grainger
1CNRS, Poitiers, France. ranka.bijeljac@mshs.univ-poitiers.fr
Memory & Cognition
|July 1, 1997
Summary
Bilinguals show inhibited word recognition when primes are orthographically similar, even across languages. Higher proficiency means stronger cross-language effects, suggesting simultaneous lexical activation.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Bilingualism Research
Background:
- Lexical decision tasks investigate word recognition processes.
- Orthographic similarity can influence word processing.
- Bilingual language representation is a key area of research.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine how orthographically related primes affect target word recognition in bilinguals.
- To investigate whether priming effects differ between within-language and across-language conditions.
- To explore the role of bilingual proficiency in cross-language priming.
Main Methods:
- Two lexical decision experiments were conducted.
- High-frequency words served as prime stimuli, either in the same or different language as the target.
- Orthographic relatedness between prime and target was manipulated.
Main Results:
- Within the same language, orthographically related primes inhibited target recognition.
- Across languages, inhibition increased with bilingual proficiency.
- Highly proficient bilinguals showed similar inhibition across and within languages.
Conclusions:
- Printed words can activate lexical representations in both of a bilingual's languages simultaneously.
- This cross-language activation occurs even during monolingual tasks.
- Language proficiency is a critical factor in the extent of simultaneous activation.