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Competing activation in bilingual language processing: Within- and between-language competition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2003

VIORICA MARIAN  and
MICHAEL SPIVEY
VIORICA MARIAN
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
MICHAEL SPIVEY
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examined spoken language processing in Russian-English bilinguals. The proportion of looks to objects whose names were phonologically similar to the name of a target object in either the same language (within-language competition), the other language (between-language competition), or both languages at the same time (simultaneous competition) was compared to the proportion of looks in a control condition in which no objects overlapped phonologically with the target. Results support previous findings of parallel activation of lexical items within and between languages, but suggest that the magnitude of the between-language competition effect may vary across first and second languages and may be mediated by a number of factors such as stimuli, language background, and language mode.

Type
Research Article
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , August 2003 , pp. 97 - 115
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 2003

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Footnotes

The authors wish to thank Ton Dijkstra and Judy Kroll for helpful comments on this work, as well as the editors and reviewers for valuable suggestions and comments on the manuscript. We also thank our students, Nora Chan and Alex Raichew for assisting with Experiment 1, Eugene Shildkrot and Olga Kats for assisting with Experiment 2, and Margarita Kaushanskaya for help with phonetic transcriptions and with tables.