The effects of non-linguistic cues on bilingual language use

Ibañez, A. 1 , Molnar, M. 1 & Carreiras, M. 1, 2, 3

1 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL). Donostia. Spain.
2 Ikerbasque. Basque Foundation for Science
3 Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea - Universidad del País Vasco

Most bilingual language users adjust to the ongoing language context with no difficulty. However, what underlies such efficiency is hardly understood. It has been shown that linguistic cues (i.e., phonological priming) aid the bilingual user with this process, although the contribution of non-language related contextual cues to this process, such as the familiarity with the other speaker, is rather unclear.
In order to investigate to what extent non-linguistic cues affect the activation of languages, we tested simultaneous bilingual speakers of Spanish and Basque using a lexical decision paradigm. First, in a familiarization phase, participants watched pre-recorded video segments of six different individuals who spoke in Spanish or Basque only. While watching these segments, the participants implicitly learnt to associate each individual with one of the languages (three with Spanish, and three with Basque). Then, in a subsequent test phase, the participants were presented with a series of short video segments showing the individuals from the familiarization phase saying a Spanish or Basque word, or a Spanish-like or Basque-like non-word. After each segment presented, the participants had to decide whether they heard a real word or a non-word by pressing a corresponding button. About 75% of the time, the individuals on these video segments spoke in the same language as they did during the familiarization phase (congruent trials); however, in the rest of the trials there was a mismatch between the language they spoke during familiarization and the language of the auditory stimuli during the test phase (incongruent trials). Reaction times triggered by the lexical decision task in response to the congruent and incongruent trials were compared for both words and non-words. Results show that the bilingual language organization, at the level of comprehension, is affected by non-language related contextual cues.