Activation of Non-Target Language Phonology During Bilingual Visual Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Tracking

Activation of Non-Target Language Phonology During Bilingual Visual Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Tracking Margarita Kaushanskaya (m-kaushanskaya@northwestern.edu) Northwestern University Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, Il 60208 Viorica Marian (v-marian@northwestern.edu) Northwestern University Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, Il 60208 reading task requiring use of only the target language) has accumulated over the past three decades (e.g., De Groot, Delmaar, & Lupker, 2000; Nas, 1983; Van Heuven, 2000; Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998). Activation of non-target language phonological information has been reported for bilingual readers of languages with shared alphabets, such as English and French (Jared & Szucs, 2002), Dutch and English (Dijkstra, Grainger, & van Heuven, 1999), Spanish and Catalan (Costa, Miozzo, & Caramazza, 1999), and Dutch and French (Brysbaert, Van Dyck, & Van de Poel, 1999). Activation of phonological information for the non-target language has also been reported in the case of bilinguals who speak languages with entirely different alphabets, like Hebrew and English (Tzelgov et al., 1996). However, it is still largely unknown whether phonological information for the non-target language is activated when the letter string in the target language carries little resemblance to the non-target language orthography (but see Feldman & Turvey, 1983; Lukatela et al, 1978). In this experiment, we used a modified Picture-Word Interference (PWI) task to test whether phonological information for Russian is automatically activated during processing of non-words in English. The stimuli were constructed to contain English-specific letters, but constitute viable phonological Russian words. Using head-mounted eye-tracking methodology, we examined Russian-English bilinguals’ ability to control their eye-movements to distractor words in the PWI task when these words contained phonological, but not orthographic information for Russian. The proportion of eye-movements to the distractor word signified the degree to which Russian phonological information drew the participants’ eye- movements, while the reaction times to naming the target picture stimulus signified the degree to which the Russian phonological word interfered with picture naming in English. Eye-tracking technology has been used to explore parallel activation of the two languages known to a bilingual during auditory perception tasks (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003 a, b). Eye-tracking has also been widely used in research of reading (e.g., Reichle, Rayner, & Pollatsek, 1999; Starr & Rayner, 2001). Unlike automatic eye-movements observed Abstract Russian-English bilingual and English monolingual participants were tested on the Picture-Word Interference task modified for use with an eye-tracker. Distractor words were 1) non-words in English, but viable phonological words in Russian, 2) control bigram matched non-word stimuli, and 3) English translations of the Russian words. Russian-English bilinguals looked at the phonological Russian words more than monolingual participants, and took longer to name pictures accompanied by these stimuli than did monolingual participants. Proportion of eye-movements and reaction times to the other two types of distractor stimuli did not differ for the two groups. These results suggest that phonology of the non-target language is activated automatically during visual word recognition in the target language, even for written stimuli that do not carry orthographic information for the non- target language. Introduction The task of reading is hard enough when the reader reads in one language alone. In the case of a bilingual reader, the picture is even more complex: Not only does a bilingual reader need to process the written information in one language, but he or she may have to contend with information from his or her other language that also becomes activated. The activation of the non-target language during reading in the target language is implemented in the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) model of visual word recognition (Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998; 2002). The BIA+ model is a localist connectionist model with elements from both the dual-route models of reading (e.g., Coltheart et al., 1993; Coltheart et al., 2001; Ziegler et al., 2000) and the connectionist models of reading. (e.g., Plaut et al., 1996; Seidenberg and McClelland, 1989; Van Orden and Goldinger, 1994). The BIA+ model proposes that lexical access of a visually presented word in a bilingual is non-selective, i.e., when a word is presented, information for that word, both orthographic and phonological, is activated for both of the bilingual’s languages. Support for such non-selective processing of written information in bilinguals (i.e., activation of the non-target language orthography and/or phonology when involved in a