In two experiments, we explored the degree to which sentence context effects operate at a lexical or conceptual level by examining the processing of mixed-language sentences by fluent SpanishEnglish bilinguals. In Experiment 1, subjects' eye movements were monitored while they read English sentences in which sentence constraint, word frequency, and language of target word were manipulated. A frequency x constraint interaction was found when target words appeared in Spanish, but not in English. First fixation durations were longer for high-frequency Spanish words when these were embedded in high-constraint sentences than in low-constraint sentences. This result suggests that the conceptual restrictions produced by the sentence context were met, but that the lexical restrictions were not. The same result did not occur for low-frequency Spanish words, presumably because the slower access of low-frequency words provided more processing time for the resolution of this conflict. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 using rapid serial visual presentation when subjects named the target words aloud. It appears that sentence context effects are influenced by both semantic/conceptual and lexical information.The extent to which contextual information influences word recognition during sentence comprehension has been studied extensively for what it might tell us about the general nature of language processing. There are now many demonstrations that words are processed faster when preceded by a constraining context than when preceded by a neutral context. Evidence offacilitation in processing a contextually constrained target word has been obtained in experiments using naming (Stanovich

A transfer paradigm was used to investigate the relationship between picture naming and translation English-Spanish bilniguals first named pictures and subsequently translated words in both their first (LI) and second (L2) languages Some words in the translation task were repetitions of concepts that had previously been named as pictures Whereas picture naming produced reliable transfer to translation from L1 to L2, it produced no transfer to translation from L2 to L1 The results support the claim that connections in bilingual memory are asymmetric Translation is conceptually mediated from L1 to L2 but lexically mediated from L2 to L1

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