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Assessing the presence of lexical competition across languages: Evidence from the Stroop task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

ALBERT COSTA ,
BÁRBARA ALBAREDA  and
MIKEL SANTESTEBAN
ALBERT COSTA*
Affiliation:
GRNC, Parc Científic de Barcelona & Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona
BÁRBARA ALBAREDA
Affiliation:
GRNC, Parc Científic de Barcelona & Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona
MIKEL SANTESTEBAN
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
*
Address for correspondence: Albert Costa, Dept. Psicologia Basica, Universitat de Barcelona, P. Vall d'Hebron, 171 08035 Barcelona, Spainacosta@ub.edu
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Abstract

Do the lexical representations of the non-response language enter into lexical competition during speech production? This issue has been studied by means of the picture–word interference paradigm in which two paradoxical effects have been observed. The so-called CROSS-LANGUAGE IDENTITY EFFECT (Costa, Miozzo and Caramazza, 1999) has been taken as evidence against cross-linguistic lexical competition. In contrast, the so-called PHONO-TRANSLATION EFFECT (Hermans, Bongaerts, De Bot and Schreuder, 1998) has been interpreted as revealing lexical competition across languages. In this article, we assess the reliability of these two effects by testing Spanish–Catalan highly-proficient bilinguals performing a Stroop task. The results of the experiment are clear: while the cross-language identity facilitation effect is reliably replicated, the phono-translation interference effect is absent from the Stroop task. From these results, we conclude that we should be cautious when drawing strong conclusions about the presence of competition across languages based on the phono-translation effect observed in the picture–word interference paradigm.

Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 121 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

*

This research was supported by a grant from the Spanish Government (SEJ-2005), a grant from the European Science Foundation (BFF2002-10379-E), by the McDonnell grant “Bridging Mind Brain and Behavior”. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Albert Costa. The authors are grateful to Ms Ivanova and Dr Hermans for their comments on previous versions of this manuscript.

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