Cross-linguistic influence in the bilingual lexicon: Evidence for ubiquitous facilitation and context-dependent interference effects on lexical processing

Abstract

For bilinguals, lexical access in one language may affect, or be affected by, activation of words in another language. Research to date suggests seemingly contradictory effects of such cross-linguistic influence (CLI): in some cases CLI facilitates lexical access while in others it is a hindrance. Here we provide a comprehensive review of CLI effects drawn from multiple disciplines and paradigms. We describe the contexts within which CLI gives rise to facilitation and interference and suggest that these two general effects arise from separate mechanisms that are not mutually exclusive. Moreover, we argue that facilitation is ubiquitous, occurring in virtually all instances of CLI, while interference is not always present and depends on levels of cross-language lexical competition. We discuss three critical factors – language context, direction, and modality of CLI – which appear to modulate facilitation and interference. Overall, we hope to provide a general framework for investigating CLI in future research.

Differential weighting of information during aloud and silent reading: Evidence from representational similarity analysis of fMRI data

“…The role of DLPFC in language processing is discussed above, while the inferior parietal lobules have been linked to multisensory integration, particularly in the context of episodic encoding (Mesulam, 1998; Pasalar et al, 2010; Seghier, 2013; Zeller et al, 2015). As such, we posit that the role of dorsal premotor cortex in our study may reflect integration of each word’s semantic features during articulatory planning or monitoring, via connections to DLPFC; recognizing that accessing semantic features of a word can facilitate access to that word’s phonological representations (e.g., Bailey et al, 2023). Another possibility is that this area supports integration of semantic features into multisensory episodic representations (consistent with Fawcett et al, 2022), via connections to inferior parietal cortex.…”

Individual differences in L2 proficiency moderate the effect of L1 translation knowledge on L2 lexical retrieval

“…Examining the role that translation equivalents play in a unilingual production context is critical given that the competition for selection account is thought to explain bilingual language production dynamics when two languages are explicitly involved in the task as well as when only one is. One challenge for the competition for selection account is that the effect of translation equivalents across a range of language production tasks is mixed (for a review, see Bailey et al, 2023). Language switching tasks generally reveal costs (for a review, see Declerck & Philipp, 2015), while picture word interference (Costa et al, 1999) and some picture-naming tasks reveal facilitatory effects (Gollan & Acenas, 2004).…”