Language blocking and lexical access in bilinguals

Abstract

Two experiments are described which compared the effects of mixed- and pure-language lists on lexical decision times with English-French bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that reaction times are faster in the pure-language presentation than in the mixed-language presentation with words that are orthographically legal letter strings in the other language. The second experiment tested this pure-mixed effect more precisely by comparing different sequences of two successive items and by introducing the language-specific orthography factor. No pure-mixed effect was found for words with language-specific orthographies. The pure-mixed effect was restricted to words containing no language-specific orthographic cues and to the different language sequences, that is, on trials following a language change. These results are not compatible with a selective search process that it strategically modified by pure-language presentation. The role of language-specific orthography in bilingual word recognition is discussed with regard to recent models of word recognition.