2007/04/04

Costa, A. & Santesteban, M. (2004). Lexical access in bilingual speech production: Evidence from language switching in highly proficient bilinguals and L2 learners. Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 491– 511.

Presentation: Chris
Summary: Shelly

This study aims to explore how L2 proficiency level affects bilinguals' processing of lexical selection in speech production. Five experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, the authors intended to see whether there exists language inhibition when L2 learners code-switch by using the picture-naming paradigm. Results indicated that, for both SpanishCatalan bilinguals and Korean/Spanish bilinguals, the switching cost was bigger when L2 was switched to L1 than in the opposite direction, implying that language inhibition exists, and more cost is needed when inhibiting the dominant language. In Experiment 2, the same question was tested on highly proficient bilinguals. Results showed that the cost was the same for L1 to L2 and L2 to L1 switching. Experiment 3 was conducted to test the results in Experiment 2 by using more stimuli, and its results were in accord with those in Experiment 2. The results in Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 implied that highly proficient bilinguals do not apply language inhibition when switching between codes. In order to test this implication, Experiment 4 was conducted by involving L3, a less proficient language for the bilinguals, in the paradigm, and the results showed that the switching cost between L1 and L3 was symmetrical, implying that language inhibition mechanism is not activated for highly proficient bilinguals. However, the results of symmetrical switching costs in Experiments 2, 3, and 4 were different from those of Experiment 1. Therefore, Experiment 5 was performed to see whether the asymmetrical switching cost in Experiment 1 was due to the advanced triggering for weak L2 by L2 learners, and the results indicated that the answer is negative. Summing up from the results of the above experiments, it was concluded that the lexical retrieval process is different between L2 learners and highly proficient bilinguals; the former used the inhibition mechanism, but the latter did not. Instead, they were probably using a language-specific selection mechanism.