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Article published In:
Studies of Bilingual Processing Presented to Kenneth I. Forster
Edited by Nan Jiang
[Journal of Second Language Studies 4:2] 2021
► pp. 268–292

Lexical selection in bilingual language production

Evidence from a picture-naming task

| Santa Monica College, USA
| University of Arizona, USA

The goal of this study is to examine whether bilingual speakers can inhibit one language while naming pictures in the other. In two picture-word interference task experiments, Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Spanish. We used language-neutral (nonword) interfering stimuli to probe the phonological activation of the nontarget language (English). Three different interfering stimulus conditions were presented: nonwords phonologically related to the Spanish picture name (Phono-Spanish), nonwords phonologically related to the English picture name (Phono-English) and phonologically unrelated nonwords (Unrelated). When participants named pictures in Spanish (Experiment 1), facilitation was found for both groups in the Phono-Spanish condition. No interference was found in the Phono-English condition for either group. From this result and the results of a control experiment in which participants named pictures in English (Experiment 2), we argue that under some circumstances, bilinguals are able to effectively inhibit the nontarget language during language production.

Keywords: language production, bilingual speech, coactivation, lexical selection
Article outline
  • Experiment 1: Picture naming in Spanish
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials and design
      • Spanish proficiency test
      • Naming pretest
      • Procedure
  • Results
    • Group 1: English as L1
    • Naming latencies
    • Errors
    • Group 2: Spanish as L1
    • Naming latencies
    • Errors
  • Discussion
  • Experiment 2: Picture naming in English
    • Method
      • Participants
      • Materials and design
      • Procedure
  • Results
    • Group 1: English as L1
    • Naming latencies
    • Errors
    • Group 2: English as L2
    • Naming latencies
    • Errors
  • General discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.21016.hal
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