Activation of Non-Target Language Phonology During Bilingual Visual Word Recognition: Evidence from Eye-Tracking

Russian-English bilingual and English monolingual participants were tested on the Picture-Word Interference task modified for use with an eye-tracker. Distractor words were 1) non-words in English, but viable phonological words in Russian, 2) control bigram matched non-word stimuli, and 3) English translations of the Russian words. Russian-English bilinguals looked at the phonological Russian words more than monolingual participants, and took longer to name pictures accompanied by these stimuli than did monolingual participants. Proportion of eye-movements and reaction times to the other two types of distractor stimuli did not differ for the two groups. These results suggest that phonology of the non-target language is activated automatically during visual word recognition in the target language, even for written stimuli that do not carry orthographic information for the nontarget language.