Investigating Bilingual Lexical Access: Processing French-English Homographs in Sentential Contexts

One controversy in bilingual language processing research is whether individuals who speak more than one language selectively activate or access lexical representations in a target language, that is the language they are currently using, or whether instead, they nonselectively activate lexical representations in both languages, regardless of the language currently in use. Much of the research focused on the issue of selective vs. nonselective lexical access has made use of interlingual homographs, words like coin that share the same spelling in two languages, in this case English and French, but differ in meaning. In English coin means “piece of money” while in French it means “corner”. Language selective lexical access would entail activating only the meaning associated with the target language upon encountering an interlingual homograph like coin (e.g., Gerard & Scarborough, 1989; Macnamara & Kushnir, 1971). This possibility is illustrated in Figure 1(a), in which the orthographic string “coin” is read in French and activates only the “corner” meaning. In contrast, lexical access that is language nonselective would entail activating both the “corner” meaning associated with the word coin in French, and the “money” meaning associated with the English word coin (e.g., Altenberg & Cairns, 1983; Beauvillain & Grainger, 1987; Dijkstra & Van Heuven, 1998). This is illustrated in Figure 1(b).