The impact of individual differences on cross-language activation of meaning by phonology

Authors

Deanna C. Friessen, Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario
Veronica Whitford, Department of Psychology, Brain and Mind Institute, Western University
Debra Titone, Department of Psychology, Centre for Research on Brain. Language and Music, McGill University
Debra Jared, Department of Psychology, Western UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-10-2019

Journal

Bilingualism: Language and Cognition

Volume

1

Issue

21

URL with Digital Object Identifier

10.1017/S1366728919000142

Abstract

We investigated how individual differences in language proficiency and executive control impact cross-language meaning activation through phonology. Ninety-six university students read English sentences that contained French target words. Target words were high- and lowfrequency French interlingual homophones (i.e., words that share pronunciation, but not meaning across langauges; mot means ‘word’ in French and sounds like ‘mow’ in English) and matched French control words (e.g., mois – ‘month’ in French). Readers could use the homophones’ shared phonology to activate their English meanings and, ultimately, make sense of the sentence (e.g., Tony was too lazy to mot/mois the grass on Sunday). Shorter reading times were observed on interlingual homophones than control words, suggesting that phonological representations in one language activate cross-language semantic representations. Importantly, the magnitude of the effect was modulated by word frequency, and several participant-level characteristics, including French proficiency, English word knowledge, and executive control ability.