Recognition of Interlingual Homophones in Bilingual Auditory Word Recognition.

How do bilinguals recognize interlingual homophones? In a gating study, word identification and language membership decisions by Dutch-English bilinguals were delayed for interlingual homophones relative to monolingual controls. At the same time, participant judgments were sensitive to subphonemic cues. These findings suggest that auditory lexical access is language nonselective but is sensitive to language-specific characteristics of the input. In 2 cross-modal priming experiments, visual lexical decision times were shortest for monolingual controls preceded by their auditory equivalents. Response times to interlingual homophones accompanied by their corresponding auditory English or Dutch counterparts were also shorter than in unrelated conditions. However, they were longer than in the related monolingual control conditions, providing evidence for online competition of the 2 near-homophonic representations. Experiment 3 suggested that participants used sublexical cues to differentiate the 2 versions of a homophone after language nonselective access.