Carrasco, H. 1 , Midgley, K. 2, 1 & Frenck-Mestre, C. 3, 1
1 Aix-Marseille University
2 Tufts University
3 Centre National de Recherche Scientifique
The present study investigates whether phonological representations of both the first and second language are activated when bilinguals read silently in a second language specific context. Behavioral studies involving interlingual-homophones have suggested that bilinguals activate phonological representations of both languages during L2 word recognition (Dijkstra, Grainger & Van Heuven, 1999; Haigh and Jared, 2007; Lemhofer and Dijkstra, 2004). However, the data from these studies are inconsistent with respect to the role of phonological overlap across languages, i.e. whether it facilitates or inhibits word recognition. Herein, we used ERPs as a means to complement existing behavioral data and help resolve the issue regarding the role of phonological information during silent reading in bilinguals. French-English speakers and monolingual English controls performed a semantic categorization task while reading silently in English. The critical items were interlingual homophones (e.g., pool in English which has substantial phonological overlap with the French word “poule”, meaning “chicken”) and control words matched for frequency, length and orthographic overlap. Results showed a significant interaction between word type and participant group for the N400 response: Bilingual speakers showed a significant reduction in N400 amplitude in response to interlingual homophones in comparison to control words whereas English monolingual speakers showed no variation in the N400 amplitude as a function of homophone status. The reduced N400 response to homophones specifically for the bilinguals suggests facilitation rather than inhibition of word recognition. Overall, these results suggest parallel activation of both L1 and L2 phonological representations when reading silently in the L2. These results point to a nonspecific language model for bilinguals at the phonological level of representation. In addition, this finding provides further support to the theories of phonological mediation in visual word recognition, which can be generalized to bilingual word processing.