Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…

We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. Two experiments examined the effect of the root morpheme on word identification by assessing parafoveal preview benefit effects. Although the information of the preview was not consciously perceived, preview of the root's letters facilitated both…

Clarifies Grosjean's Language Mode (LM) hypothesis, which develops the notion of language mode or the relative state of activation of a bilinguals two or more languages and language processing systems. Discusses studies that do not support views of the LM hypothesis. Studies of Dutch-English bilingual are presented. (Author/VWL)

Two experiments investigated the processing and representation of Dutch compound words as a function of their semantic transparency. The results provided clear evidence for the sensitivity of the lexical processing system to morphological complexity, independent of semantic transparency. (50 references) (MDM)

The relatedness of phonological coding to the articulatory mechanisms in visual word recognition vary in different writing systems. While articulatory suppression (i.e., continuous verbalising during a visual word processing task) has a detrimental effect on the processing of Japanese words printed in regular syllabic Khana script, it has no such…

Orthogonally manipulated three word characteristics in Dutch and English--word imageability; word frequency; and cognate status--and obtained similar data patterns for three groups of bilinguals different from one another in second-language fluency. Findings indicate that "concept mediation" is a universal process in translating words…

A study investigated word recognition processes of Greek/English bilinguals in relation to linguistic and syntactic differences in the languages, then compared those processes with those of monolinguals. Bilingual readers performed differently in the languages, conforming more to monolingual patterns in their native language (Greek), interpreted…

A study investigated differences in English word recognition in native speakers of Indonesian (an alphabetic language) and Chinese (a logographic languages) learning English as a Second Language. Results largely confirmed the hypothesis that an alphabetic first language would predict better word recognition in speakers of an alphabetic language,…

A study investigated lexical decision-making among Dutch-English bilinguals in the auditory modality. Subjects, bilinguals at three proficiency levels (intermediate, high, and near-native) were presented with 40 cognate and 40 non-cognate word pairs, a similar number of English and Dutch distractors, and a similar number of nonsense words in each…

A study investigated the roles of phonological encoding and visual processes in word recognition in American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. Subjects were 36 individuals with proficiency ranging from beginning to native. Two experiments in word recognition were conducted, one at word and one at sentence level. At each level, the word…

Data from an auditory lexical decision experiment with English-Dutch bilinguals are compared with data from a similar experiment using visual lexical decision to determine the effect of language proficiency, mode of presentation, and cognateness of lexical items on lexical processing. The results indicate significant within and between-language…

The background of word association tests is described, their potential relevance to second language (L2) research considered, and the history of their use as L2 measuring instruments reviewed. A computer-controlled word association test is described. The test was not established as a valid indicator of language proficiency. (Author/LMO)

Current models of spoken-word recognition describe access to lexical representations in terms of activation and decay. This research investigated an important aspect of activation: the impact of processing time. The results showed a separable impact of time and signal on the activational state of lexical elements. (34 references) (Author/CK)

A study investigated the processes used by bilinguals for organizing vocabulary by presenting subjects with bilingual word recognition tasks in two modalities (aural and visual) and using a repetition paradigm. Subjects were asked to decide whether a word presented to them was a nonsense word or a real word. Two separate experiments are described.…