Inhibitory processes in bilingual language comprehension: Evidence from Spanish–English interlexical homographs

Abstract

This study examines how Spanish–English bilinguals select meanings of words that share the same orthography across languages but differ in meaning (interlexical homographs such as pie, meaning foot in Spanish). Bilingual participants were required to decide whether pairs of English words were related. In Experiment 1, participants were slower to respond to homographs presented along with words related to the Spanish meaning of the homograph as compared to control words. More importantly, bilinguals were slower to respond when the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning was presented after responding to homographs. This result suggests that bilinguals inhibited the irrelevant homograph meaning. These inhibitory processes were independent of response type (yes/no) since participants were again slower to respond to the English translation when response type changed in Experiment 2. These results suggest that bilingual language selection in comprehension tasks implies inhibitory processes.