Martín, M. C. , Macizo, P. & Bajo, M. T.
University of Granada
This study investigated inhibitory mechanisms in language selection in Spanish-English bilinguals during the processing of interlexical homographs in a sentence context. Recent studies on out-of-context homographs processing have shown cross-language activation, and that inhibitory processes are triggered to select the target meaning (Macizo, Bajo, & Martín, 2010). Moreover, Martín et al. (2010) showed that this inhibitory effect had a transient effect of around five-hundred milliseconds. In this study, participants read sentences in English, including homographs as critical stimuli. After each sentence, they were presented a test word and had to decide weather the word was related with the sentence meaning. Test words included the English translation of the Spanish homograph meaning, and they were presented 100 ms immediately after the sentence or after 500 ms. The results showed that participants slowed their responses to the critical test words preceded by sentences including homographs relative to control test words. This effect was only observed at the immediate interval. A control experiment with English monolinguals showed no differences among conditions. The overall pattern of results further extends our previous findings to homograph processing in a sentence context.