Phonological activation in bilinguals: Evidence from interlingual homograph naming

Abstract

This study investigated whether bilinguals simultaneously activate phonological representations from both of their languages when reading words in just one. The critical stimuli were interlingual homographs (e.g., PAIN) that were low in frequency in the target language of the study (English) and high in frequency in the nontarget language (French). Both English-French and French-English bilinguals were tested. In each experiment, participants named a block of English experimental words, a block of French filler words, and then a second block of English experimental words. In the first block of English trials, the English-French bilinguals had similar naming latencies for homographs and English-only control words, although they made more errors on homographs. In contrast, the French-English bilinguals showed a homograph disadvantage in both the latency and error data. In the second block of English trials, both the English-French bilinguals and the French-English bilinguals showed homograph interference on latency and error measures. We interpret these results as indicating that the activation of phonological representations can appear to be both language-specific and nonspecific, depending on the characteristics of the bilingual and whether they have recently named words in the nontarget language.