| A series of experiments investigated whether or not bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages (English and French) when reading silently in one language. More specifically, they examined whether or not there is evidence for the nonselective view of bilingual language processing from bilinguals reading in their first language as well as in their second language. Previous evidence indicates that bilinguals activate phonological representations from their first language when reading in their second, but fewer studies have found evidence that bilinguals activate phonological representations from their second language when reading in their first. Both English-French and French-English bilinguals were tested in two separate studies. All of the critical stimuli in these experiments were English words. In the first study English lexical decision latencies for interlingual homophones and matched English control words were compared. In the second study, a phonological priming paradigm was used in which the critical comparison was between performance on English target words (e.g., TEA) when they were preceded by primes that were homophonic to target words only when pronounced using French spelling-sound correspondences (e.g., tis, rhymes with "oils"), and when they were preceded by graphemic control primes (e.g., taf). The results provide clear evidence that bilinguals activate phonological representations from both of their languages when they read in their second language, however, there was only weak evidence that bilinguals activate phonological representations from both languages when they read in their first language. This work shows that a theory or model of bilingual word recognition needs to be able to explain how bilingual phonological activation can appear to be both language selective and nonselective, depending on the bilinguals' relative proficiency in the language in which they are reading.;Keywords. Bilingualism, Phonology, Word Recognition, Priming, Homophones, Words (Phonetic Units)... |
