Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts

Abstract

In three experiments, we studied the influence of foreign language knowledge on native language performance in an exclusively native language context. Trilinguals with Dutch as their native and dominant language (L1), English as their second language (L2), and French as their third language (L3) performed a word association task (Experiment 1) or a lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) in L1. The L1 stimulus words were cognates with their translations in English, cognates with their translations in French, or were noncognates. In Experiments 1 and 2 with trilinguals who were highly proficient in English and relatively low in proficiency in French, we observed shorter word association and lexical decision times to the L1 words that were cognates with English than to the noncognates. In these relatively low-proficiency French speakers, response times (RTs) for the L1 words that were cognates with French did not differ from those for the noncognates. In Experiment 3, we tested Dutch-EnglishFrench trilinguals with a higher level of fluency in French (i.e., equally fluent in English and in French). We now observed faster responses on the L1 words that were cognates with French than on the noncognates. Lexical decision times to the cognates with English were also shorter than those to the noncognates. The results indicate that words presented in the dominant language, to naive participants, activate information in the nontarget, and weaker, language in parallel, implying that the multilinguals' processing system is profoundly nonselective with respect to language. A minimal level of nontarget language fluency seems to be required, however, before any weaker language effects become noticeable in L1 processing.

Visual word recognition by bilinguals in a sentence context: Evidence for nonselective lexical access.

“…Similar to Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002), our stimuli were mostly nearcognates, which are orthographically/phonologically very similar, but not identical (e.g. ship -schip).…”

“…Because the cognate facilitation effect seems to be more reliable in L2 than in L1 (see above), we decided to use a L2 reading task. Similar to Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002), our stimuli were mostly nearcognates, which are orthographically/phonologically very similar, but not identical (e.g. ship -schip).…”

“…This may be important because Grosjean (1997; see also Soares & Grosjean, 1984) suggested that the degree of lexical autonomy depends on the 'language mode' that a bilingual is in: depending on the language context and the bilinguals' expectations, lexical access may be more or less selective. Therefore, our primarily near-cognate stimulus set, just as that of Van Hell and Dijkstra (2002), constitutes a very strong test of lexical autonomy. We did however include a few identical cognates as well, allowing us to investigate whether the degree of cross-lingual overlap interacts with the cognate effect in a Bilingual Word Recognition in Sentences 13 sentence context.…”

“…We did however include a few identical cognates as well, allowing us to investigate whether the degree of cross-lingual overlap interacts with the cognate effect in a Bilingual Word Recognition in Sentences 13 sentence context. But, for the reasons outlined above, the proportion of language-ambiguous words (identical cognates) was kept extremely low (i.e., 6.67% of all word targets).In our first experiment, we used a standard L2 lexical decision task (similar to that of Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002, for example) with word targets presented in isolation. This was necessary to validate our stimuli before using them in a sentence reading task.…”

Cognitive control and lexical access in younger and older bilinguals.

“…W. Green, 1998;Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot, & Schreuder, 1998;Jared & Kroll, 2001;Rodriguez-Fornells et al, 2005;Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2002). More recent evidence for this joint interaction has isolated specific effects on phonological production in the target language (Costa, Roelstraete, & Hartsuiker, 2006) and shown the persistence of such influences even for two languages that are written in different types of writing systems (Hoshino & Kroll, 2008).…”