Singh, N. & Mishra, R.
Centre of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences. Allahabad University. Allahabad. UP. India
We tested Hindi-English bilinguals differing in their L2 ( English) proficiency on a lexical access task. In a visual world eye tracking study, subjects listened sentences containing a target word a saw four line drawings on the computer screen. One of the words was either a cohort or a rhyme compitator of the translational equivalent of the spoken word. We presented sentences in both L1-L2 as well as L2-L1 direction. Proportion of fixations to the translation equivalent in the other language showed that bilinguals with higher L2 proficiency quickly oriented their attention to the target in the L1-L2 condition for cohorts but not for rhymes. Bilinguals with low L2 proficiency however did not activate translation equivalents in any condition. We discuss the results following the predictions of the revised RHM model of bilingual lexical representation. Further we discuss the implication of such research in the Indian scenario where everyone is either a bilingual or multilingual.