When language switching has no apparent cost: Lexical access in sentence context

When language switching has no apparent cost: Lexical access in sentence context

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We report two experiments that investigate the effects of sentence context on bilingual lexical access in Spanish and English.Highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences in Spanish and English that included a marked word to be named.The word was either a cognate with similar orthography and/or phonology in the two languages, or a matched non-cognate control.Sentences appeared in one language alone (i.e.

, Spanish or English) and target words were not predictable on the basis of the preceding semantic context.In Experiment 1, we mixed the language of the Accessories sentence within a block such that sentences appeared in an alternating run in Spanish or in English.These conditions partly resemble normally occurring inter-sentential code-switching.In these mixed language sequences, cognates were named faster than non-cognates in both languages.There were no effects of switching the language of the sentence.

In Experiment 2, with Spanish-English bilinguals matched closely to those who participated in the first experiment, we blocked the language of the sentences to encourage language-specific processes.The results were virtually identical to those of the mixed language experiment.In both cases, target cognates were named Bosch KGE36VW4AG Freestanding Fridge Freezer in White faster than non-cognates, and the magnitude of the effect did not change according to the broader context.Taken together, the results support the predictions of the Bilingual Interactive Activation + Model (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002) in demonstrating that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective even under conditions in which language-specific cues should enable selective processing.They also demonstrate that, in contrast to lexical switching from one language to the other, inter-sentential code-switching of the sort in which bilinguals frequently engage, imposes no significant costs to lexical processing.