Molnar, M. , Ibañez, A. & Carreiras, M. .
Basque Center on Brain, Language, and Cognition (BCBL). Donostia, Spain.
Proficient bilingual language users adjust to the ongoing language context without difficulty; however, what underlies such efficiency is hardly understood. It has been shown that linguistic cues (i.e., phonological priming) aid bilingual users with this process, although the contribution of non-language related contextual cues, such as 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 users of Spanish and Basque using a lexical decision paradigm. First, in a familiarization phase, participants implicitly learnt to associate six individuals with Basque, Spanish, or bilingual language contexts (two individuals with each of the contexts). 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 words or non-words. About 75% of the time, the individuals 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 across the different language contexts.
Our overall findings clearly demonstrated that non-linguistic cues (familiarity with another person’s language background) play a significant role in bilingual language selection. This implies that bilingual language activation is not only biased by the actual language of interaction per se, but by anticipation based on previous experience as well.