The time course of bilingual lexical access in deaf ASL-English bilinguals (ASL)
Research on hearing bilinguals has established that bilinguals never fully suppress
the non-target language during lexical processing (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 2002; Marian
& Spivey, 2003; Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002). Of various between-language factors that
may influence word recognition in bilinguals, cognate status appears to account for the
most variability (Lemhöfer et al., 2008). But suppose a bilingual knows two languages
that do not share cognates? Current theorizing would predict that in the absence of
cognates, lexical processing should not be influenced by the non-target language.
Contrary to this prediction of the spoken language bilingualism literature, several recent
studies have found evidence of parallel activation in deaf and hearing bilinguals who are
fluent in a signed and a spoken language, even in monolingual tasks (Morford et al.,
2011; Ormel et al., 2012; Shook & Marian, 2012).
To gain greater insight into the nature of bilingual lexical processing in deaf
signers, we designed a study to investigate whether cross-language activation occurs prelexically or post-lexically in deaf bilinguals. Post-lexical activation would indicate that
semantic relationships in the bilingual lexicon are sufficient to mediate parallel activation
effects. By contrast, if cross-language activation is pre-lexical, this suggests a role for
phonological or orthographic representations in the process of parallel activation.
We tested this hypothesis by using a monolingual English task in which
participants decided whether two words were semantically related, following the
paradigm of Morford et al. (2011). Half of the English word pairs had phonologically
related translation equivalents in ASL, and half had unrelated translation equivalents.
Phonologically related translation equivalents shared two of three phonological
parameters (handshape, location and/or movement). Because the task does not require
translating the stimuli into ASL, effects of the ASL manipulation would be a strong
indication that bilinguals access the ASL translations automatically during English word
recognition. The paradigm used by Morford et al. (2011) included a 1 second stimulus
onset asynchrony (SOA), allowing ample time for activation from the English word to
spread to semantics, and then from semantics to ASL phonological forms. In our study,
SOA was manipulated such that participants had 750 ms SOA in one condition, but only
250 SOA in a second condition. Deaf participants were assessed for both ASL and
English proficiency, and divided into two groups according to their proficiency in
English. Only participants with native-like proficiency in ASL were included in the
study. 29 deaf ASL-English balanced bilinguals, 24 deaf ASL-dominant bilinguals and
43 hearing monolingual speakers of English completed the task. The hearing control
group showed no effects of the ASL manipulation, but the cross-language activation
effect was replicated at both SOAs for both groups of deaf bilinguals (see Fig. 1),
strongly indicating a role for phonological or orthographic cross-language mappings in
deaf bilingual lexical access.
Figure 1: Response time to semantically related English word pairs with and without
phonologically related ASL translations at (a) 750 ms SOA and (b) 250 ms SOA
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