Hoversten, L. 1 & Traxler, M. 2
1 BCBL
2 University of California, Davis
Prominent models of bilingual visual word recognition posit a bottom-up interactive view of lexical processing with parallel access to lexical candidates of both languages. However, they have not yet incorporated recent findings of top-down effects on bilingual lexical access during sentence processing. In particular, global language activations may differ based on the language of the preceding context and constrain expectations about the language of upcoming words. We therefore conducted two eye-tracking experiments to assess the relative contributions of bottom-up input and top-down language control in bilingual reading. Specifically, we measured the time course and degree of accessibility of words belonging to each language in different global language contexts. Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences containing a word in the same language as the rest of the sentence (non-switch), a word in the alternate language (code switch), or a pronounceable nonword (pseudoword). When critical words were presented overtly in Experiment 1, code-switched words disrupted reading early during lexical processing but not as much as pseudowords did. Trial order analyses indicated that the alternate language became more accessible with increasing exposure to it. In Experiment 2, a monolingual language context was created by presenting critical words covertly as parafoveal previews and replacing them with a different word in the same language as the rest of the sentence when foveated. Here, code-switched words were treated like pseudowords throughout the experiment. These data suggest that bilingual language control entails the dynamic use of top-down control to proactively produce nuanced changes in the word recognition system for efficiently processing bottom-up input as it arrives.