Bilingual Picture–Word Studies Constrain Theories of Lexical Selection

Abstract

Whether lexical selection is by competition is the subject of current debate in studies of monolingual language production. Here, I consider whether extant data from bilinguals can inform this debate. In bilinguals, theories that accept the notion of lexical selection by competition are divided between those positing competition among all lexical nodes vs. those that restrict competition to nodes in the target language only. An alternative view rejects selection by competition altogether, putting the locus of selection in a phonological output buffer, where some potential responses are easier to exclude than others. These theories make contrasting predictions about how quickly bilinguals should name pictures when non-target responses are activated. In Part 1, I establish the empirical facts for which any successful theory must account. In Part 2, I evaluate how well each theory accounts for the data. I argue that the data do not support theories that reject lexical selection by competition, and that although theories where competition for selection is restricted to the target language can be altered to fit the data, doing so would fundamentally undermine the distinctness of their position. Theories where selection is by competition throughout both target and non-target language lexicons must also be modified to account for the data, but these modifications are relatively peripheral to the theoretical impetus of the model. Throughout, I identify areas where our empirical facts are sparse, weak, or absent, and propose additional experiments that should help to further establish how lexical selection works, in both monolinguals and bilinguals.

Electrophysiology of cross-language interference and facilitation in picture naming

“…However, other authors (i.e., Hall, 2011;Hermans, 2004) have come to different conclusions by arguing that competitive interference of translation distractors is not observed due to particularly strong semantic priming effects (because of perfect conceptual overlap of translation equivalents).…”

“…In sections 1.1 and 1.2, we briefly describe the key behavioral results from monolingual and bilingual picture-word interference studies and we argue that the available response time (RT) evidence is most compatible with the within-language competition view (but see Hall, 2011). Whereas RT studies measure the time elapsing between picture and articulation onset, event-related brain potential (ERP) studies provide electrophysiological information about processing events happing during this time interval.…”

“…For instance, Poulisse and Bongaerts (1994) observed that in second-language (English) picture naming, story retelling, and free conversation by Dutch-English bilingual speakers, only 0.5 percent of all words produced were first-language (Dutch) intrusions (i.e., 771 out of about 140,000 words). In the literature, three main views have been proposed about how bilingual speakers accomplish this feat (see Hall, 2011, for an extensive review). According to the betweenlanguage competition view, words in both languages are activated and compete for selection, but speakers select the words in the target language by selectively boosting their activation (De Bot, 2004) or by inhibiting words in the other language (e.g., Green, 1998;Kroll, Bobb, Misra, & Guo, 2008;Kroll, Bobb, & Wodniecka, 2006).…”

“…The effect is mediated rather than direct. However, the magnitude will be the same for the between-language and within-language effects, because semantic interference is calculated with respect to an unrelated word in the same language, which factors out any baseline difference (Hall, 2011;Roelofs, 1992). Moreover, translation distractors activate the target name but will not compete, which will yield the translation facilitation effect.…”

“…However, for the same reason, although translation distractors may help targets to exceed the selection threshold quicker, this effect should also be countered by the response-exclusion process because of conceptual similarity, 11 yielding translation interference. Under another view (discussed by Hall, 2011), distractors from another language can be excluded so quickly that response exclusion no longer offsets target priming and the net effect is facilitation. However, this would predict facilitation for both the semantically related and the translation distractors, contrary to the empirical findings.…”