Working memory influences on cross-language activation during bilingual lexical disambiguation
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ANA B. ARÊAS DA LUZ FONTES [1] ; ANA I. SCHWARTZ [1]
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[1] University of Texas at El Paso
University of Texas at El Paso
Estados Unidos
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- Localización: Bilingualism: Language and cognition, ISSN 1366-7289, Vol. 14, Nº 3, 2011, págs. 360-370
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
This study investigated the role of verbal working memory on bilingual lexical disambiguation. Spanish–English bilinguals read sentences that ended in either a cognate or noncognate homonym or a control word. Participants decided whether follow-up target words were related in meaning to the sentences. On critical trials, sentences biased the subordinate meaning of a homonym and were followed by targets related to the dominant meaning. Bilinguals with high span were faster at rejecting unrelated targets when the sentences ended in a homonym, whereas bilinguals with low span were slower. Furthermore, error rates for bilinguals with low span showed cognate inhibition, while bilinguals with high span showed no effects of cross-language activation. Results demonstrated that bilinguals with high span benefit from shared lexical codes whether these converge on to a single semantic representation (cognates) or not (homonyms). Conversely, bilinguals with low span showed inhibition from the competing lexical codes, even when they converge onto a single semantic representation.
