Phonological processing dynamics in bilingual word naming.

The current study investigated phonological processing dynamics in bilingual word naming. English-French and French-English bilinguals named interlingual heterophonic homographs (i.e., words that share orthography but not meaning or pronunciation across languages), heterophonic cognates (i.e., words that share both orthography and meaning across languages, but not pronunciations), interlingual homophones (i.e., words that share pronunciation, but not orthography or meaning across languages), and single-language matched control words in both English and French naming tasks. Cross-language phonological activation was strongest in bilinguals' second language. The results provided evidence for feedforward activation of phonological representations in the nontarget language, as well as feedback activation of these phonological representations from semantic representations. Results are interpreted within the more recent Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA+) framework.