Abstract
AbstractFour hypotheses regarding the impact of discourse context on cross-language lexical activation were tested. Highly-proficient, Spanish–English bilinguals read all-English paragraphs containing non-identical and identical cognates or noncognate controls while their eye-movements were tracked. There were four paragraph conditions based on a full crossing of semantic bias from the topic sentence and sentence containing the critical word. In analyses in which cognate status was treated categorically there was an interaction between global bias and cognates status such that the observed inhibitory effects of cognate status were attenuated in global-neutral contexts. Follow-up analyses on the non-identical cognates in which orthographic overlap was treated continuously revealed a U-shaped function between orthographic overlap and processing time, which was more pronounced in global-neutral contexts. The overall pattern of findings is consistent with a combined operation of resonant-based and feature-restriction mechanisms of context effects.
Highlights
A key characteristic of bilingual reading is that word identification involves activation of lexical representations from both languages
Follow-up analyses on the non-identical cognates in which orthographic overlap was treated continuously revealed a U-shaped function between orthographic overlap and processing time, which was more pronounced in global-neutral contexts
There are numerous studies demonstrating that when bilinguals encounter words in one language, activation flows across both languages
Summary
A key characteristic of bilingual reading is that word identification involves activation of lexical representations from both languages. In two of the earliest studies that examined the influence of sentence context on cross-language activation, cognate facilitation effects were observed in low constraint sentences but eliminated in high constraint contexts (Schwartz & Kroll, 2006; van Hell & de Groot, 2008) Both of these studies used tasks in which participants made an overt response to the target words such as naming, making a lexical decision or translating. When the code-switched words were of high frequency and inserted in biasing contexts, interference effects were observed in processing time This suggests that the semantic bias provided by the sentence caused readers to generate a specific set of both semantic and lexical form feature restrictions. For this set we tested whether effects of bias from context on cognate processing would be modulated by the degree of lexical form overlap
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