Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper presents two expenments providing strong support for an interactive-activation interpretation of bilingual memory. In both experiments French-English interlexical noncognate homographs were used, i.e., words like fin (= "end" in French), pain (= "bread" in French), that have a distinct meaning in each language. An All-English condition, in which participants saw only English items (word and non-words) and a Mixed condition, with half English and half French items, were used. For a set of English target words that were strongly primed by the homographs in the All-English condition (e.g., shark, primed by the homograph fin), this priming was found to disappear in the Mixed condition. We suggest that this is because the English "component" of the homograph is inhibited by the French component which only becomes active in the Mixed condition. Further, recognition times for these homographs as words in English were sigmficantly longer in the Mixed condition and the amount of this increase was related to the relative strength (in terms of printed-word frequency) of the French meaning of the homograph. We see no reasonable independent-access dual-lexicon explanation of these results, whereas they fit easily into an interactive-activation framework.