Cross-linguistic phonotactic competition and cognitive control in bilinguals

ABSTRACT

The current study examines the relation between cognitive control and linguistic competition resolution at the sublexical level in bilinguals. Twenty-one Spanish–English bilinguals and 23 English monolinguals completed a non-linguistic Stroop task (indexing inhibitory control) and a linguistic priming/lexical decision task (indexing Spanish phonotactic-constraint competition during English comprehension). More efficient Stroop performance (i.e. a smaller Stroop effect) in bilinguals was associated with decreased competition from Spanish phonotactic constraints during English comprehension. This relation was observed when nonword targets overlapped in phonotactic constraints and phonological form with preceding cognate primes (e.g. prime: stable (Spanish: estable)/target: esteriors). Findings suggest a link between non-linguistic cognitive control and co-activation of linguistic structures at the sublexical level in bilinguals.

KEYWORDS:

• Bilingualism
• parallel activation
• cognitive control
• competition resolution
• phonotactic constraints

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank members of the Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group at Northwestern University and the Bilingualism & Cognition Lab at San Diego State University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Freeman, Blumenfeld, et al. (2016), we tested 22 Spanish-English bilinguals and 23 English monolinguals. We included 21 bilinguals in the current study because of equipment malfunction during the Stroop task for one of the bilingual participants.

2 Previous studies that have identified bilingual advantages on the Stroop task employed considerably larger sample sizes (Bialystok, Craik, & Luk, 2008) and bilingual advantages on cognitive control tasks, relative to monolingual peers, are generally small or absent for young adults (e.g. Bialystok, Martin, & Viswanathan, 2005). In the current study, the goal was not to identify bilingual advantages but to examine relations between non-linguistic and linguistic competition.

3 See Freeman, Blumenfeld, et al. (2016) for detail on repeated-measures ANOVAs on the PPLD task. In brief, two 3 (prime: cognate, non-cognate, control) × 4 (target: phonotactic-constraint-and-form overlap nonword, phonotactic-constraint-only nonword, nonword control, word control) × 2 (group: monolingual, bilingual) ANOVAs were performed on (1) reaction times and (2) accuracy rates. For RT, there was a main effect of group, F (1, 43) = 11.70, p < .01; monolinguals (M = 656 ms responded faster to lexical decision targets than bilinguals (M = 881 ms), p < .01. A main effect of visual target condition was also found, F (3, 129) = 16.02, p < .001. Bilinguals were faster on phonotactic-constraint-and-form nonwords and phonotactic-constraint-only nonwords when primed with non-cognates, as well as faster to respond to phonotactic-constraint-and-form nonwords when primed with cognate than control trials. For accuracy, there was a main effect of target, F (3, 129) = 4.26, p < .01, with participants more accurate on phonotactic-constraint-and-form nonword trials (M = 96.89%) than on word control trials (M = 94.87%), p = .045. In sum, bilinguals experienced co-activation of phonotactic constraints from Spanish during English language comprehension.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development [grant number 1R01HD059858 to the third author].