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The Mental Lexicon: Online-First Articles

Intralingual and interlingual effects in a pure language list

Evidence for language-selective lexical access?

ORCID logo | University of Antwerp
 | University of Antwerp
 | University of Antwerp
In various English lexical decision tasks (LDTs), bi-/multilinguals have evinced shorter response times (RTs) for cognates (i.e., words with the same meaning in two languages, e.g., the Dutch-English water) and longer RTs for interlingual homographs (IHs; words with distinct meanings in two languages, e.g., the Dutch-English map) compared to monolingual controls (e.g., Biloushchenko, 2017). This suggests that multilinguals automatically activate lexical representations from multiple languages (Dijkstra et al., 1998). To further investigate language (non-)selectivity, in our English LDTs, we compare the processing of cognates and IHs to intralingual words that are similar but only exist in English (i.e., cognates to metonyms like chicken, which can refer to the animal and the closely-related sense “chicken meat”, and IHs to homonyms like bat, which has two meanings: “baseball bat” and “nocturnal flying animal”). Half of our cognates and IHs only exist in our native Dutch participants’ non-native languages (English-French) to avoid any potentially confounding effects of the supposed “special status” (Midgley et al., 2011) of L1. Significant inhibition was found for homonyms and significant facilitation for metonyms and native (Dutch-English) cognates but not for non-native (English-French) cognates. These results are discussed in relation to the language non-selective hypothesis (Dijkstra et al., 1998).
Keywords: multilingualism, non-native language processing, language (non-)selective lexical access, lexical decision task
Article outline
  • Goals
  • Experiments
    • Design
    • Participants
  • Results
  • Discussion
    • The IH-homonym experiment
    • The cognate-metonym experiment
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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References (15)
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