Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The traditional language switch hypothesis, according to which bihnguals can selectively activate and deactivate either language, has been repeatedly challenged in recent studies. In particular, an eyetracking experiment investigating spoken language processing suggests that bilinguals maintain both languages active in parallel even during monolingual input. The present study extends this finding to circumstances exhibiting between-language competition, within-language competition, or both. In this experiment, we find evidence for lexical items in the first language interfering with processing of the second language. We find that, in addition to competing activation between languages, bilinguals (like monolinguals) encounter competition within languages. Moreover, the results suggest that when simultaneous competition is encountered from items in both languages, within-language competition may be stronger than between-language competition. It appears that a bilingual's irrelevant language continues to be processed even when not actively used. However, this phenomenon is considerably influenced by language mode, even when such variables as word frequency, phonetic overlap, and language preference are taken into account.