A time course analysis of interlingual homograph processing: Evidence from eye movements

Abstract

We recorded eye movements during natural reading to explore the influence of sentence context on bilingual word recognition. English monolinguals and Spanish–English bilinguals read sentences in English that biased either the English or the Spanish meaning of interlingual homographs. Shortly after encountering the homograph, the groups showed equivalent implausibility effects when its English meaning was incongruent with the preceding sentence context. No evidence for immediate homograph interference emerged during this period in the bilingual group. Only in later processing measures did group and congruency interact. Bilinguals may have initially accessed and selected the language appropriate meaning of the homograph to integrate into the sentence. Later, bilinguals accessed their first language lexicon and integrated the Spanish meaning into the sentence when semantically appropriate. Rather than always experiencing cross-language competition, proficient bilinguals may dynamically adapt to contextual cues and selectively access information associated with the contextually cued language under certain conditions.