Parallel language activation and cognitive control during spoken word recognition in bilinguals

Abstract

Accounts of bilingual cognitive advantages suggest an associative link between crosslinguistic competition and inhibitory control. We investigate this link by examining English-Spanish bilinguals' parallel language activation during auditory word recognition and nonlinguistic Stroop performance. Thirty-one English-Spanish bilinguals and 30 English monolinguals participated in an eyetracking study. Participants heard words in English (e.g., comb) and identified corresponding pictures from a display that included pictures of a Spanish competitor (e.g., conejo, English rabbit). Bilinguals with higher Spanish proficiency showed more parallel language activation and smaller Stroop effects than bilinguals with lower Spanish proficiency. Across all bilinguals, stronger parallel language activation between 300 and 500 ms after word onset and reduced parallel language activation between 633 and 767 ms after word onset were associated with smaller Stroop effects. Results suggest that bilinguals who perform well on the Stroop task show increased crosslinguistic competitor activation during early stages of word recognition and decreased competitor activation during later stages of word recognition. Findings support the hypothesis that crosslinguistic competition impacts domain-general inhibition.

Keywords:

• Parallel language activation
• Inhibition
• Stroop task
• Bilingualism
• Eyetracking

We would like to thank Dr. Guillaume Thierry, Dr. Marcel Giezen, Dr. Joey Lin, and Dr. Margarita Kaushanskaya, members of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Laboratory at Northwestern University, including James Bartolotti, Anthony Shook, Scott Schroeder, Sarah Chabal, and Jennifer Krizman, and members of the Bilingualism and Cognition Laboratory at San Diego State University, including Vanessa Howes and Shirlene Wade, for helpful discussions of this work, as well as Dr. Judy Kroll and 2 anonymous reviewers for feedback on a previous version of this manuscript. This project was supported in part by a John and Lucille Clarke Dissertation Scholarship and San Diego State University Grant Program Grant No. 242338 to HKB, and by Grant NICHD 1R01HD059858 to VM.

Notes

¹ Thirty monolinguals were recruited to ensure that null findings in monolinguals’ correlations between eyetracking and cognitive control measures were not due to a lack of power.

² The spatial Stroop task in the current study consisted of only congruent and incongruent trials, consistent with Liu et al. (2004) and with Blumenfeld and Marian (2011). In this study, we aimed to establish an initial link between parallel language activation and a cognitive task that has been shown to have neural correlates (Liu et al., 2004) consistent with those of cognitive control processes in bilinguals (Abutalebi, 2008; Liu et al., 2004). We reasoned that, if participants can inhibit irrelevant location information, then incongruent location information should interfere less with their response and congruent location information should provide less facilitation towards their response, thus providing a reduced difference score between congruent and incongruent conditions.

³ The 3 target–competitor pairs that were omitted because of within-language overlap were (1) target seal and Spanish competitor silla (“chair”) due to the English synonym seat; (2) target beans and Spanish competitor bigote (“moustache”) due to the English word beard; and (3) target female and Spanish competitor fiesta (“party”) due to the English word feast and because monolingual participants were likely familiar with the word fiesta.