Cross-Linguistic Orthographic Effects in Late Spanish/English Bilinguals

Christopher Dean,Jorge Valdés Kroff

doi:10.3390/languages2040024

Abstract

Through the use of the visual world paradigm and eye tracking, we investigate how orthographic–phonological mappings in bilinguals promote interference during spoken language comprehension. Eighteen English-dominant bilinguals and 13 Spanish-dominant bilinguals viewed 4-picture visual displays while listening to Spanish-only auditory sentences (e.g., El detective busca su banco ‘The detective is looking for his bench’) in order to select a target image. Stimuli included two types of trials that represent potential conflict in bilinguals: b-v trials, e.g., banco-vaso ‘bench-glass’, representing homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations in Spanish, and j-h trials, e.g., juego-huevo ‘game-egg’, representing interlingual homophonous phonemes with distinct graphemic representations. Data were collected on accuracy, reaction time (RT), and mean proportion of target fixation. Reaction Time results indicate that Spanish-dominant speakers were slower when the competitor was present in b-v trials, though no effects were observed for English-dominant speakers. Eye-tracking results indicate a lack of competition effects in either set of trials for English-dominant speakers, but lower proportional target fixations for Spanish-dominant speakers in both sets of trials when an orthographic/phonological distractor was present. These results suggest that Spanish-dominant bilinguals may be influenced by the orthographic mappings of their less-dominant L2 English, providing new insight into the nature of the interaction between the orthography and phonology in bilingual speakers.

Highlights

Bilinguals often use only one language during a single conversation, decades of research have shown that the other language(s) does not lay dormant
Analyses of reaction time (RT) and eye-tracking fail to show a hindrance on competitor trials, but even suggest a reversal effect in that speakers seem to be less hindered on competitor trials when compared to non-competitor trials, potentially indicating a delayed processing effect for non-competitor trials
Though the orthographic system may have played a role in influencing the English-dominant group, allowing them to ignore competing items associated with a distinct initial grapheme, we cannot as draw this same conclusion with the Spanish-dominant speakers, who did experience competition; that is, we cannot fully attribute these results to orthographic influence, in that this may be a result of pure phonological competition within the L1, as and map onto the same phoneme

Summary

Introduction

Bilinguals often use only one language during a single conversation, decades of research have shown that the other language(s) does not lay dormant. During both comprehension and production and during either visual word or spoken language processing, linguistic information from both languages tends to interact and compete for selection. Though studies in the past have provided evidence of language independence [2,3], more recent empirical evidence supports the notion of language non-selectivity [4,5,6]. Many studies have been carried out in order to observe which aspects of a bilingual’s language inventories interact and the consequences of this interaction

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