Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen
Fecha
2022Autor
Villameriel, Saúl
Costello, Brendan
Giezen, Marcel
Carreiras, Manuel
Metadatos
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Villameriel, S.*, Costello, B.*, Giezen, M., & Carreiras, M. (2022). Cross-modal and cross-language activation in bilinguals reveals lexical competition even when words or signs are unheard or unseen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 119 (36):e2203906119. Doi:10.1073/pnas.2203906119* equal contribution
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Resumen
We exploit the phenomenon of cross-modal, cross-language activation to examine the
dynamics of language processing. Previous within-language work showed that seeing a
sign coactivates phonologically related signs, just as hearing a spoken word coactivates
phonologically related words. In this study, we conducted a series of eye-tracking
experiments using the visual world paradigm to investigate the time course of crosslanguage
coactivation in hearing bimodal bilinguals (Spanish–Spanish Sign Language)
and unimodal bilinguals (Spanish/Basque). The aim was to gauge whether (and how)
seeing a sign could coactivate words and, conversely, how hearing a word could coactivate
signs and how such cross-language coactivation patterns differ from withinlanguage
coactivation. The results revealed cross-language, cross-modal activation in
both directions. Furthermore, comparison with previous findings of within-language
lexical coactivation for spoken and signed language showed how the impact of temporal
structure changes in different modalities. Spoken word activation follows the temporal
structure of that word only when the word itself is heard; for signs, the temporal structure
of the sign does not govern the time course of lexical access (location coactivation
precedes handshape coactivation)—even when the sign is seen. We provide evidence
that, instead, this pattern of activation is motivated by how common in the lexicon the
sublexical units of the signs are. These results reveal the interaction between the perceptual
properties of the explicit signal and structural linguistic properties. Examining languages
across modalities illustrates how this interaction impacts language processing.