Sebastian-Galles, N., Echeverria, S., & Bosch, L. (2005). The influence of initial exposure on lexical representation: Comparing early and simultaneous bilinguals. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 240–255.
This paper investigated the influences of L1 and the age of acquisition of L2 on the lexical decisions for Spanish-Catalan and Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. In Experiment 1, early bilinguals of Spanish and Catalan who only differed in their acquisition order participated in the study. Due to the fact that the contrast between vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ does not exist in Spanish, it is predicted that Spanish-Catalan bilinguals will have more difficulties in distinguish these two vowels than Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Results showed that Catalan-Spanish bilinguals did better with the /ɛ/ type stimuli. Experiment 2 was conducted to test whether there was any experimentally-induced bias in Experiment 1. Bilinguals with the same language background as speakers in Experiment 1 were recruited. The only difference between the two experiments was that only control stimuli were used in Experiment 2. Results showed that RT differences in both groups were not significant. In Experiment 3, simultaneous Spanish-Catalan and simultaneous Catalan-Spanish bilingual differing in their dominant language participated in the study. Simultaneous bilinguals showed intermediate behavior between the early Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and the early Catalan-Spanish bilinguals. Furthermore, simultaneous Catalan bilinguals performed better than simultaneous Spanish bilinguals. For the /ɛ/ type stimuli, both Catalan-Spanish bilinguals and Spontaneous-Catalan bilinguals performed better than the Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and the Spontaneous-Spanish bilinguals. For the /e/ type stimuli, the performance order was: Catalan-Spanish better than Spontaneous-Catalan, which is better than Simultaneous-Spanish, which is better than Spanish-Catalan. The conclusion is that for simultaneous bilinguals, the early exposure to a contrast (i.e., /e/-/ɛ/) is not sufficient for them to have the same level of proficiency for distinction as those who only are exposed to a single language (i.e., the Catalan-Spanish bilinguals). Moreover, even within the simultaneous group, the ability to distinguish the contrast is different. Speakers with their mother speaking Catalan as a native language performed better than those with their mother speaking Spanish as a native language, indicating that the amount of the initial exposure can be responsible to the differences between the two groups.
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