Color naming in Tsimane’–Spanish bilinguals indicates that differential experience with content domains affects lexical access

Abstract

A standard assumption in the bilingual language processing literature is that the ease of access of a word in a language is determined by the speaker’s overall proficiency in the language. Alternatively, it could be that proficiency varies across semantic categories of the bilingual’s two languages. Here, we investigated lexical access in color terms in Tsimane’–Spanish bilinguals. Given that color terms are generally more frequent in Spanish than Tsimane’, participants may have better lexical access for color words in Spanish despite being overall more proficient in Tsimane’. Twenty-two Tsimane’–Spanish bilinguals took part in a picture naming task where participants labeled colors and animals. Participants were equally fast and accurate at naming animals in Tsimane’ and Spanish. However, participants were faster and more accurate at naming colors in Spanish than Tsimane’ except for the three color words that are most frequent (jaibes ~ white, tsincus ~ black, jaines ~ red) in Tsimane’, for which they were equally fast in both Tsimane’ and Spanish. These results suggest that category-specific proficiency is a better predictor for lexical access than overall proficiency.