The effect of translation knowledge on bilingual lexical production is mixed, with some studies showing translation interference and others showing facilitation. We considered the roles of first-language (L1) translation knowledge and second-language (L2) proficiency in lexical retrieval, testing predictions of the competition for selection, frequency lag and activation boosting accounts. In experiment 1, 54 highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals named pictures of low-frequency nouns in English (L2). Spanish (L1) translation knowledge and English proficiency had an interactive effect on tip-of-the-tongue experiences with increased L1 translation interference at low levels of L2 proficiency and facilitation at high levels of L2 proficiency, consistent with combined predictions of competition for selection and activation boosting accounts. Experiment 2 confirmed that confounding lexical variables did not drive translation effects. By examining individual differences within bilinguals, we found support for multiple mechanisms that play a role in bilingual lexical retrieval that were not evident at the group level.

Previous research examining the factors that determine language choice and voluntary switching mainly involved early bilinguals. Here, using picture naming, we investigated language choice and switching in late Dutch–English bilinguals. We found that naming was overall slower in cued than in voluntary switching, but switch costs occurred in both types of switching. The magnitude of switch costs differed depending on the task and language, and was moderated by L2 proficiency. Self-rated rather than objectively assessed proficiency predicted voluntary switching and ease of lexical access was associated with language choice. Between-language and within-language switch costs were not correlated. These results highlight self-rated proficiency as a reliable predictor of voluntary switching, with language modulating switch costs. As in early bilinguals, ease of lexical access was related to word-level language choice of late bilinguals.

Most cognate research suggests facilitation effects in picture naming, but how these effects manifest in bilinguals after brain damage remains unclear. Additionally, whether this effect is captured in clinical measures is largely unknown. Using data from the Boston Naming Test, we examined the naming of cognates and noncognates, the extent of cognate facilitation produced, and the individual differences in bilingual language experience associated with naming outcomes in forty Spanish–English bilingual persons with aphasia (BPWA) relative to thirty-one Spanish–English healthy bilinguals (HB). Results suggest that naming performance in L1 and L2 in both groups is modulated by lexical frequency, bilingual language experience, and by language impairment in BPWA. Although the two groups showed similarities, they deviated in benefit drawn from the extent of phoneme/grapheme overlap in cognate items. HB showed an association between cognate facilitation and bilingual language experience, while cognate facilitation in BPWA was only associated with L2 language impairment.

A large literature has shown that language context –mixing and switching between languages – impacts lexical access processes during bilingual speech production. Recent work has suggested parallel contextual effects of language context on the phonetic realization of speech sounds, consistent with interactions between lexical access and phonetic processes. In this pre-registered study, we directly examine the link between lexical access and phonetic processes in Spanish–English bilinguals using picture naming. Using automated acoustic analysis, we simultaneously gather measures of reaction time (indexing lexical access) and acoustic properties of the initial consonant and vowel (indexing phonetic processes) for the same speakers on the same trials. Across measures, we find consistent, robust effects of mixing and language dominance. In contrast, while switching effects are robust in reaction time measures, they are not detected in phonetic measures. These inconsistent effects suggest there are constraints on the degree of interaction between lexical access and phonetic processes.

Four hypotheses regarding the impact of discourse context on cross-language lexical activation were tested. Highly-proficient, Spanish–English bilinguals read all-English paragraphs containing non-identical and identical cognates or noncognate controls while their eye-movements were tracked. There were four paragraph conditions based on a full crossing of semantic bias from the topic sentence and sentence containing the critical word. In analyses in which cognate status was treated categorically there was an interaction between global bias and cognates status such that the observed inhibitory effects of cognate status were attenuated in global-neutral contexts. Follow-up analyses on the non-identical cognates in which orthographic overlap was treated continuously revealed a U-shaped function between orthographic overlap and processing time, which was more pronounced in global-neutral contexts. The overall pattern of findings is consistent with a combined operation of resonant-based and feature-restriction mechanisms of context effects.

The inhibitory effect of positional syllable frequency is a well-known phenomenon in visual word recognition: words with high-frequency syllables require extra time for deactivating the lexical syllabic neighbors. The inhibitory effect implies that a connection exists between graphemes, phonemes, the first syllable, and the phonological lexicon. However, experimental results of the first developmental stages of occurrence are scarce and inconclusive. A second- and fourth-grade sample of typical school readers participated in a lexical decision task containing high/low frequency words and high/low syllable frequency words. Our primary hypothesis was that the inhibitory effect would be found on both school grade groups. We did not predict significant differences in magnitude of effect between second- and fourth-grade participants. A general inhibitory effect was found, and separate analyses by school grade groups also indicated significant inhibitory effects. Furthermore, second- and fourth-grade children showed small sizes of the inhibitory effect, resembling the sizes found in adult normal readers. Our results suggest that Spanish readers reach a functional connection between syllables and words at an early stage. The straightforward theoretical implication is that the inhibitory effect relies heavily on the structural properties of the lexical access system that are acquired at an early age.

Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in school-aged children. In Study 1, children named a series of contiguous, semantically related pictures. The results revealed no cumulative interference effects. Study 2 utilized an approach more closely aligned with adult methods, incorporating intervening, unrelated items intermixed with semantically related items within a continuous list. Study 2 showed a linear increase in reaction time as a function of ordinal position within semantic sets. These findings demonstrate cumulative semantic interference effects in young, school-aged children that are consistent with experience-driven changes in the connections that underlie lexical access. They invite further investigation of how children's lexical representation and processing are shaped by speaking experiences.

When bilinguals name pictures while in ‘monolingual mode’, we expect that under conditions of language-constraint and no cognate facilitation, factors influencing lexical retrieval in monolinguals ought to exert similar effects on bilinguals. To this end, we carried out a L1-only naming task on early Hindi–English bilinguals. Results of linear mixed effects analysis reveal AoA, Familiarity, Image Agreement and Codability (availability of alternate names) to be the most significant predictors of lexical retrieval speed for early bilinguals, confirming our expectations. However, we report, for the first time, a by-subject variation in Codability for bilinguals. Implications of the results are discussed in the context of current theories of bilingual lexical access and competition. In preparation for this study, Hindi norms from bilinguals for items in the Snodgrass and Vanderwart set have been established, which will be of use for stimuli selection in experimental studies involving bilinguals.

Late second language (L2) learners experience pervasive difficulty mastering grammatical gender, and a comprehensive account of this deficit has yet to emerge. We investigate a previously unexamined aspect of L2 gender use: the time course of lexical feature retrieval. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) with a covert production task, we examined whether L2 gender retrieval is delayed relative to phonology and to the time course of feature retrieval in native speakers for familiar nouns whose gender participants had strong knowledge of. Results find that L2 gender retrieval is not fundamentally delayed, and that L2 lexical feature retrieval may be more susceptible to top-down influences. These findings place important constraints on accounts of L2 acquisition and processing with respect to how lexical features are represented and retrieved. Our results further suggest that deficits in online L2 gender use may stem from post-retrieval processes and/or retrieval errors rather than inherent delays in gender retrieval.

Are simultaneous interpreters subject to the central processing bottleneck, which can postpone the reaction time and impair the performance of another concurrent task, during word production? Moreover, is there any difference between interpreters, bilinguals and monolinguals in the word production bottleneck? In this study, professional simultaneous interpreters, proficient bilinguals and monolinguals performed a dual task consisting of a picture naming task in sentence context (Task 1) and a pitch tone discrimination task (Task 2). The results show that interpreters are also subject to the central processing bottleneck during word production, and there is no significant difference between the three groups in the duration of the word production bottleneck. Unexpected differences in performance were found between English–Asian language and English–European language pairs within the interpreter group, but not within the bilingual group, showing that European-language interpreters were as fast as monolinguals in lexical access, and faster than Asian-language interpreters and bilinguals.

A question central to bilingualism research is whether representations from the contextually inappropriate language compete for lexical selection during language production. It has been argued recently that the extent of interference from the non-target language may be contingent on a host of factors. In two studies, we investigated whether factors such as word-type and individual differences in inhibitory control capacities influence lexical selection via a cross-modal picture-word interference task and a non-linguistic Simon task. Highly proficient French–English bilinguals named non-cognate and cognate target pictures in L2 (English) while ignoring auditory distractors in L1 (French) and L2. Taken together, our results demonstrated that lexical representations from L1 are active and compete for selection when naming in L2, even in highly proficient bilinguals. However, the extent of cross-language activation was modulated by both word-type and individual differences in inhibitory control capacities.

The present study examines the influence of language proficiency and language combination on bilingual lexical access using category fluency in 109 healthy speakers. Participants completed a category fluency task in each of their languages in three main categories (animals, clothing, and food), each with two subcategories, as well as a language use questionnaire assessing their proficiency. Five language combinations were examined (Hindi–English, Kannada–English, Mandarin–English, Spanish–English, and Turkish–English). Multivariate analyses of variance revealed that the average number of correct items named in the category fluency task across the three main categories varied across the different groups only in English and not the other language. Further, results showed that language exposure composite (extracted from the questionnaire using a principal component analysis) significantly affected the average number of items named across the three main categories. Overall, these results demonstrate the effects of particular language combinations on bilingual lexical access and provide important insights into the role of proficiency on access.

Research on nonnative auditory word recognition makes use of a lexical decision task with phonological priming to explore the role of phonological form in nonnative lexical access. In a medium-lag lexical decision task with phonological priming, nonnative speakers treat minimal pairs of words differentiated by a difficult phonological contrast as a repetition of the same word. While native speakers show facilitation in medium-lag priming only for identical word pairs, nonnative speakers also show facilitation for minimal pairs. In short-lag phonological priming, when the prime and the target have phonologically overlapping onsets, nonnative speakers show facilitation, while native speakers show inhibition. This review discusses two possible reasons for facilitation in nonnative phonological priming: reduced sensitivity to nonnative phonological contrasts, and reduced lexical competition of nonnative words with underdifferentiated, or fuzzy phonolexical representations. Nonnative words may be processed sublexically, which leads to sublexical facilitation instead of the inhibition resulting from lexical competition.

This paper provides a concise overview of the cross-modal priming methodology, it presents a selection of key studies to illustrate how this method can be used to address lexical and syntactic processing and discusses advantages and disadvantages, along with issues that need to be taken into consideration when designing studies that address sentence processing in bilinguals.

Is the specific consonant–vowel (CV) letter combination of a word a basic source of information for lexical access in the early stages of processing? We designed two masked priming lexical decision experiments to respond to this question by directly examining the role of CV skeletal structure in written-word recognition. To that aim, each target word was preceded by a one-letter different nonword prime that kept the same CV skeletal structure or not. We also included an identity prime as a control. Results showed faster word identification times in the CV congruent condition than in the CV incongruent condition when a consonant was replaced from the target (paesaje–PAISAJE < parsaje–PAISAJE), but not when it was a vowel (alusno–ALUMNO = alueno–ALUMNO). This dissociation poses problems for those accounts based on an early activation of the CV skeletal structure during lexical processing. Instead, this pattern of data favors the view that it is the word's consonant skeleton rather than the CV skeletal structure that is the key element in the early phases of word processing. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings.

Using a semantic priming experiment, the influence of lexical access and knowledge of semantic relations on reading comprehension was studied in Dutch monolingual and bilingual minority children. Both context-independent semantic relations in the form of category coordinates and context-dependent semantic relations involving concepts that co-occur in certain contexts were tested in an auditory animacy decision task, along with lexical access. Reading comprehension and the control variables vocabulary size, decoding skill, and mental processing speed were tested by means of standardized tasks. Mixed-effects modeling was used to obtain individual priming scores and to study the effect of individual differences in the various predictor variables on the reading scores. Semantic priming was observed for the coordinate pairs but not the context-dependently related pairs, and neither context-independent priming nor lexical access predicted reading comprehension. Only vocabulary size significantly contributed to the reading scores, emphasizing the importance of the number of words known for reading comprehension. Finally, the results show that the monolingual and bilingual children perform similarly on all measures, suggesting that in the current Dutch context, language status may not be highly predictive of vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension skill.

In English, some complex words can display exceptional accent preservation (EAP): they can preserve an accent from their base even when this would violate a general restriction against adjacent accents (e.g. retúrn → retùrnée). This article analyses EAP both empirically and theoretically. The analysis of a set of 291 derivatives from Wells (2008) shows that this phenomenon can be partially attributed to the relative frequency of the base and its derivative and partially also to syllable structure, and that these two factors have a cumulative effect. It is also shown that the existence of a more deeply embedded base (e.g. colléct→ colléctive → còllectívity ~ collèctívity) can increase the likelihood for a derivative to display EAP. A formal account of the phenomenon is proposed building on Collie's (2007, 2008) ‘fake cyclicity’ analysis, using weighted constraints (Pater 2009, 2016) and Max-Ent-OT (Goldwater & Johnson 2003). Finally, a model of lexical access building on Hay's (2001, 2003) model and integrating more deeply embedded bases is proposed.