Von Holzen, K. & Mani, N.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Does seeing an image activate auditoraly related words in L1 and/or L2? Studies using the phonological priming paradigm in monolinguals have shown that word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to a phonologically related prime; however phonological priming studies in bilinguals are limited. Van Wijnendaele and Brysbaert (2002) demonstrated that words in L1 can prime words from L2, suggesting that perceiving a word in one language can influence word recognition in the other language. Yet, previous research on phonological priming in bilinguals typically presents the prime orthographically (van Wijnendaele & Brysbaert, 2002) or auditoraly (Phillips, Klein, Mercier, & de Boysson, 2006), giving preference to the language the prime is labeled in-
The current study circumvented this problem by presenting unlabeled picture primes. Based on research that adults internally generate the label for a visually fixated image (Meyer et al., 2007), we assumed our bilingual subjects would freely and internally generate a label in one of their two languages. Subsequent targets were labeled auditorily. Target and prime were either phonologically related, unrelated or a translational equivalent of the prime image label. In the phonologically related condition, phonological similarity between prime and target labels was manipulated within (i.e. German prime, German target) and across (i.e. English prime, German target) languages.
Pilot data reveals that translational equivalents elicited the lowest N400 component, while N400 for phonologically related targets lay in between unrelated and translational primes, regardless of language. In sum, the data shows access in the bilingual lexicon is more efficient when the prime is phonologically related to the target within and across languages. Results are interpreted in light of the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994;) and the Bilingual Interactive Activation Model (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 1998).