Does a bilingual activate both languages or only the relevant language during speech production?

What is it about?

This paper investigated effects of meaning and grammatical gender in Dutch-English bilinguals using a picture-word interference paradigm. In this paradigm, bilinguals are presented line drawings of common objects with written distractor words printed across. They are instructed to name the object as quickly as possible while ignoring the written word (distractor). Their reaction times vary as a function of the relation between the object and the distractor. Some theories of bilingual language activation assume that both languages are activated in parallel. If this is the case, an English distractor word like "horse" will spread to its Dutch counterpart "paard", resulting in delayed naming times when a picture of "paard" is shown because of the competition between languages. However, if only one language is activated, faster naming times are expected. Additionally, the effect of distractor words with a different gender than the name of the picture were investigated. Results indicated an effect of language, meaning (in both Dutch and English), and gender (in Dutch) on naming latencies.

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Why is it important?

Our results show that the hypothesis on the parallel activation of a bilingual's languages of Costa and Caramazza (1999) is problematic, and provides more insights into the mechanisms of the bilingual production system.