Evidence of Non-Selective Lexical Access in Children From a Portuguese-English Bilingual School

Abstract

The issue of language selectivity regarding lexical access of bilingual adults has been thoroughly reported in the literature. However, studies with bilingual children are still limited, especially in the Brazilian context. To fill this gap, the present study was conducted with the goal of investigating whether the same cognate facilitation effect reported for bilingual adults is also true for bilingual children. To do so, two experiments were carried out. In Experiment 1, 53 Portuguese-English bilingual children from 3rd and 7th grade took part in a lexical decision task which had a Portuguese and an English version. In Experiment 2, 18 English monolinguals performed the English version of the lexical decision task. The results of Experiment 1 showed that the cognate effect was evident for the two groups of bilinguals when the task was performed in the L2- English, even though no statistical difference between the two groups of bilinguals was found. When performing the task in the L1 – Portuguese, the bilingual groups showed no cognate effect, which suggests that these participants had not reached a level of proficiency in which the L2 can influence L1 processing. The results of Experiment 2 showed no cognate facilitation effect for monolinguals, indicating that the results of the bilingual participants, in the English version of the lexical decision task, were indeed due to the cognate status of the words of the bilingual's two languages. In short, the present results favor the nonselective view of lexical access and the effect of proficiency in the perception of cross language similarity.