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Recent experience with cognates and interlingual homographs in one language affects subsequent processing in another language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2015

EVA D. POORT ,
JANE E. WARREN  and
JENNIFER M. RODD
EVA D. POORT*
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London
JANE E. WARREN
Affiliation:
Department of Language and Communication, University College London
JENNIFER M. RODD
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London
*
Address for correspondence: Eva Poort, Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, United Kingdom. eva.poort.12@ucl.ac.uk
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Abstract

This experiment shows that recent experience in one language influences subsequent processing of the same word-forms in a different language. Dutch–English bilinguals read Dutch sentences containing Dutch–English cognates and interlingual homographs, which were presented again 16 minutes later in isolation in an English lexical decision task. Priming produced faster responses for the cognates but slower responses for the interlingual homographs. These results show that language switching can influence bilingual speakers at the level of individual words, and require models of bilingual word recognition (e.g., BIA+) to allow access to word meanings to be modulated by recent experience.

Keywords

lexical decisioncognatesinterlingual homographslanguage switchingword-meaning priming
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 206 - 212
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. JEW was funded by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust awarded to JMR.

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