Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movement recordings
Maya Libben & Debra Titone Department of Psychology, McGill
Abstract
Current models of bilingualism posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. We investigated whether non-selective access occurs for words embedded in sentence contexts that semantically bias a target language. Eye movements were recorded as French–English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates, interlingual homographs or matched control words. Sentences provided low- or high-semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Our results suggest that, in semantically biased contexts, bilingual lexical access is language non-selective at early-stages of lexical access and this non-selectivity is resolved at later-stages of comprehension.
