Lexical access in bimodal bilinguals

Abstract

Manuel Carreiras, for raising the level of research related to Spanish Sign Language to the scientific equivalent of the "champions league", to paraphrase what he once told me, and for allowing me to be part of his team; and Dr. Brendan Costello for his invaluable support. Words alone cannot express all that this work owes him as a supervisor and how much I value him as a friend.The rest of the sign language team members at BCBL have also left their imprint on this thesis. Thanks to Noemi Fariña and Miguel Ángel Sampedro. Special thanks to Marcel Giezen for being such an inspiration and model to follow in research. Much love to Patricia Dias for becoming such a close friend. We have been through so much together! I am grateful to the organizations that provided staff and premises to run the experiments: CILSEM (Sign Language Interpreters Association in Madrid), ASORMADRID (Deaf Association in Madrid), Fundación CNSE (Madrid), APERSORVA (Deaf Association in Valladolid), ARANSBUR (Association of Families with Deaf Children, Burgos), APSBU (Deaf Association in Burgos), ASORNA (Deaf Association in Navarra). The University of Valladolid and the López Vicuña Vocational Institute (Palencia) have provided spaces in which to run the experiments.Thanks to Ainhoa Ruiz de Angulo for recording the signs, and for David Carcedo for his Spanish and Basque words. I am truly indebted to all the participants. Meeting them all has been one of the highlights of this study.Thanks to everyone at the BCBL for providing the perfect environment to learn how to do science and for sharing all your knowledge. I would like to mention the predoc community and especially the "Postmodern Group" for being the best companions I could

Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen

“…More generally, it lets us examine the coactivation of a word (or sign) when nothing at all is heard (or seen) and to disentangle the impact of the overt linguistic signal on lexical access of words and signs. In a previous study ( 24 , 25 ), we examined the role of sublexical units in word recognition and in sign recognition using the visual world paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are presented with a target lexical item while viewing a screen with four images, some of which are similar in form to the target item (i.e., they are phonological competitors); an eye-tracker measures fixations to the different images.…”

“…Parts of this work were developed from the doctoral thesis of S.V. ( 25 ). We thank the organizations that provided staff and premises to run the experiments: CILSEM (Sign Language Interpreters Association in Madrid), ASORMADRID (Deaf Association in Madrid), Fundación CNSE (Foundation of the National Deaf People's Confederation in Madrid), APERSORVA (Deaf Association in Valladolid), ARANSBUR (Association of Families with Deaf Children, Burgos), APSBU (Deaf Association in Burgos), and ASORNA (Deaf Association in Navarra).…”