Mapping Written Input onto Orthographic Representations: The Case of Bilinguals With Partially Overlapping Orthographies

Mapping Written Input onto Orthographic Representations: The Case of Bilinguals With Partially Overlapping Orthographies Viorica Marian (v-marian@northwestern.edu) Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Margarita Kaushanskaya (m-kaushanskaya@northwestern.edu) Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University Evanston, IL 60208 USA Abstract bilinguals were presented with a visual display containing four objects (actual objects or toy replicas, as applicable), such as a shark, a balloon (sharik in Russian), a horse, and a napkin, and were instructed in English to “pick up the shark,” they frequently made eye movements to the cross- linguistic phonological competitor sharik. In this case, the Russian word sharik was a cross-linguistic cohort (cf. Marslen-Wilson, 1987; see also Cutler, 1995; Marslen- Wilson & Welsch, 1978) of the English target word shark, i.e., the beginning portion of the name of the target object carried phonetic similarity to the name of one of the other objects in the other language. Eye movements to the cross- linguistic cohort, even when the other language is not being used overtly, supports the hypothesis that phonemic input initially activates both languages during bilingual spoken language processing. For written word recognition, studies examining whether or not both languages are activated in parallel used code switching (e.g., Doctor & Klein, 1992; Grainger, 1993; Grainger & Dijkstra, 1992; Li, 1996; Nas, 1983; Soares & Grosjean, 1984), phoneme monitoring (e.g., Colome, 2001), lexical decision (e.g., Brysbaert, Van Dyck, & Van de Poel, 1999; DeGroot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000; Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999), and priming tasks (e.g., Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987). Results indicate that orthographic input simultaneously activates lexical items across the two lexicons in the very early stages of processing, that bilingual visual word recognition is based on a stimulus-driven analysis indifferent to language, and that lexical representation in bilingual visual word recognition is governed by orthography rather than by language. For example, Bijeljac-Babic, Biardeau, and Grainger (1997) investigated activation of orthographic representations in bilingual visual word recognition by using a masked priming paradigm. Orthographic priming was observed in both monolingual and bilingual conditions, suggesting that printed strings of letters can simultaneously activate lexical representations in both languages, insofar as these share the same alphabet. In another study on visual word recognition, Van Heuven, Dijkstra, and Grainger (1998) used the interlingual neighbors paradigm (an orthographic neighbor is any word differing by a single letter from the target word). Cross- Mapping of written input onto orthographic representations was examined in bilingual speakers whose two languages have partially overlapping orthographies. Russian-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were tested with a modified version of the picture-word interference paradigm, adapted for use with eye-tracking. Compared to English monolinguals, Russian-English bilinguals (tested in English) made more eye movements to written stimuli that, if mapped onto two orthographic systems simultaneously, constituted Russian words. Results suggest parallel activation of both languages during visual processing of written input, even when the orthography is associated with different phonological representations in the two languages. We suggest that decoding of written input in languages with partial orthographic overlap is not limited to one language only, but that the mapping of visual stimuli takes place onto the orthographic systems of both languages and that lexical representations in the non-target language become activated. Introduction Recent studies of bilingual language processing challenge earlier accounts of the language switch hypothesis (e.g., MacNamara & Kushnir, 1971), according to which bilinguals are able to selectively activate and deactivate their two languages. Instead, data support interactive parallel processing accounts, according to which linguistic input activates both languages simultaneously. For spoken word recognition, evidence supporting activation of both lexicons comes from research investigating spoken language processing in bilinguals using eye-tracking (Marian & Spivey, 2003a,b; Spivey & Marian, 1999). In the eye- tracking paradigm, participants are given spoken instructions to move objects on a table while their eye movements are recorded. Although participants rarely pick up incorrect objects, it is often observed that they fixate objects that have similar phonology to the spoken word (e.g., Allopenna, Magnuson, & Tanenhaus, 1998; Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). The eye-tracking technique, merging input from both the visual and auditory modalities, was adapted for use with bilinguals to index activation of a second language non- linguistically. For example, when Russian-English