Abstract
Abstract
We investigated whether bilingual older adults experience within- and cross-language competition during spoken
word recognition similarly to younger adults matched on age of second language (L2) acquisition, objective and subjective L2
proficiency, and current L2 exposure. In a visual world eye-tracking paradigm, older and younger adults, who were French-dominant
or English-dominant English-French bilinguals, listened to English words, and looked at pictures including the target (field), a
within-language competitor (feet) or cross-language (French) competitor (fille, “girl”), and unrelated filler pictures while their
eye movements were monitored. Older adults showed evidence of greater within-language competition as a function of increased
target and competitor phonological overlap. There was some evidence of age-related differences in cross-language competition,
however, it was quite small overall and varied as a function of target language proficiency. These results suggest that greater
within- and possibly cross-language lexical competition during spoken word recognition may underlie some of the communication
difficulties encountered by healthy bilingual older adults.
Publisher
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
4 articles.
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