Ice in my eye: What distracting information tells us about how bilinguals select the language they intend to speak

McClain, R. & Kroll, J.

Pennsylvania State University

A number of studies have asked whether there is competition among phonological alternatives when bilinguals select a single word to speak. Many of these studies exploit the presence of distractor words or pictures to determine whether there is activation of lexical alternatives to the level of the phonology and, if so, whether that activation occurs within language only or extends across the bilingual’s two languages. In the present study, we examined the effect of distractor pictures on performance in both picture naming and translation tasks. In each case, picture naming or word translation were performed in the presence of a to-be-ignored picture. In the picture naming task, there was uncertainty about which of two pictures was to be named. In the translation task, participants were instructed to produce the translation and to ignore the word. A word naming control was performed by monolingual and bilingual speakers to determine whether intrusion from distracting pictures in bilingual production is a consequence of the slower time course of processing in the second language. In each experiment, we manipulated not only the relation between the phonology of the target word to be spoken and the name of picture but also the semantic relation between them. In within-language picture naming, when there was uncertainty about which of two pictures was the target, there was interference from phonologically related distractors that was reduced when the pictures were also semantically related. In contrast, in cross-language translation, there was facilitation for both phonological and semantic distractors. Critically, the word naming control produced interference rather than facilitation for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. An experiment in progress is examining these conditions using ERPs. We discuss the implications of the results for models of bilingual lexical production and for claims that cross-language alternatives compete for selection during speech planning.