Abstract
The present study investigates shared phonological information and selectivity during lexical access in Brazilian Portuguese-English unbalanced bilinguals, learners of Korean as an L3. Participants took part in a word naming task which used L2 primes with targets from the L3 at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) of 140ms and 250ms. The results show a significant facilitation effect in word naming when an English prime was presented in comparison with control primes. Additionally, a significant facilitation effect was also seen in trials in which the primes were presented at a 250ms SOA in relation to a 140ms SOA. Taken together, the results indicate that participants’ spelling-sound knowledge of L2 English was activated during the reading aloud of words in L3 Korean, which indicates nonselectivity in lexical access and a shared mental lexicon across languages.
Highlights
Despite these differences, the languages learned by an individual can share information since they are always active to some extent (DIJKSTRA; VAN HEUVEN, 2002)
The question pursued in the present study was motivated by Lee, Nam, and Katz’s (2005) findings that the spelling-sound knowledge of bilingual lexicons is activated even when no orthographic information is shared across languages, considering English and Korean have two completely different writing systems
Employing a study where phonological priming in the L2 was measured in two different conditions (140ms and 250ms stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA)), we aimed at understanding if the spelling-sound knowledge of L2 and L3 would be activated when reading target L3 words
Summary
Reading is an essential task in everyday life. When learning to read in a new language, students need to be able to understand how the written language encodes the spoken one. A lot of differences can be found across the written representation of languages, which can become a challenge for the learner, especially if such languages differ in writing systems and scripts. Despite these differences, the languages learned by an individual can share information since they are always active to some extent (DIJKSTRA; VAN HEUVEN, 2002). We address this issue in the case of multilingualism. Based on Lee, Nam, and Katz (2005), we assessed phonological priming in two different conditions through an online word naming task to investigate language selectivity during lexical access in word production in native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese who have English as a second language (L2) and are learning Korean as a third language (L3)
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