Reading and Speaking Words in Two Languages: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Bilingualism

Pennsylvania State Univ University Park, University Park PA

Investigators

Abstract

How does a bilingual read and speak words in one language when words in the other language are available and potentially compete for selection? Recent psycholinguistic research suggests that information in both of a bilingual's two languages is active during language comprehension and production. The bilingual is thus a model system to examine the conditions that give rise to competition and the manner in which that competition is resolved. This problem will be investigated in a series of experiments in which bilinguals read and speak words in one or both of their languages. The research has two aspects, comprehension and production of language. In each, experiments will examine the activation of alternative lexical candidates and the factors that modulate the resulting cross-language competition. In experiments on comprehension, word naming will be compared in the first and second languages. By manipulating the properties of the words to be named and the contexts in which they occur, it should be possible to identify the factors that induce and control language selection. In experiments on production, performance on picture naming and translation tasks will be compared to examine spoken word production in two languages. Using cued naming and task-switching paradigms, it should prove possible to examine the effects of requiring both languages to be active prior to speaking. The approach is intended to provide complementary methods for examining the activation of words in each language when a bilingual is required to speak a word in one language and to suppress or ignore information in the other language. The goal of this research is to develop converging approaches to study language comprehension and production in bilinguals. Together with existing research on monolingual language performance, the data generated by these studies should provide the basis for a more complete model of the bilingual lexicon. The mechanism of language selection that is the focus of the bilingual research has the more general potential to illuminate current debates about the type and timing of information available during comprehension and production. In this sense, bilingualism provides a useful tool for investigating universal cognitive constraints. The outcomes of this work also hold important implications for the more general problem of learning and using two languages.