English minimal stress pairs were processed loke homophones, but Arabic ones were not. In Arabic, however, mis-stressing had an adverse effect both in the acse of SW and WS words. These results are explained in terms of the asymmetry underlying the phonological structures of the two languages. In experiment 1, lexical decion response times indicated the presence of strong lexical effects both with monosyllabic and bisyllabic words. The bearings of these resultson current autonomous and interactive models are discussed.
Bilinguals require more input to isolate and identify non-marked items than Marked ones.
The data also reveal that bilinguals differ significantly from Arabic and English monolinguals with respect to the cohort proposed at each gate. These results are replicated in Experiment 2 where the presentation of Marked and Unmarked Items is blocked by language so that bilinguals receive either exclusively English or Arabic lists. This shows that even if bilinguals know that they are hearing a list of words from just one language, they continue to generate hypotheses from their other language and reflect comparable delays in recognition to subjects hearing mixed lists. In Experiment 3, Arabic-English bilinguals are presented with Unmarked words and Marked words that deviate segment initially this time from one of their two languages. When processing an item that is segment initially marked bilinguals behave like monolingual controls, recognizing the target word at the point it separates from all the other words in the language and suggesting cohortes of word candidates analogous to those suggested by monolingual controls at each gate.