Translation recognition in highly proficient Hindi-English bilinguals: The influence of different scripts but connectable phonologies

摘要

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a nontranslation distractor word and thus required a no response. The properties of the no trials were manipulated to examine participants' sensitivity to orthographic and phonological relations. The first manipulation investigated whether different-script bilinguals utilise the L1 translation equivalent link in a similar fashion as same-script bilinguals and tested the generalisability of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) to the case of different-script bilinguals. The second manipulation tested the predictions of the Bilingual Interactive Activation plus model (BIA +) regarding phonological nonselectivity in the bilingual lexicon. Results suggest that these highly proficient different-script bilinguals utilise translation equivalent lexical links in a distinct manner from same-script bilinguals, but do display nonselective phonological activation in the form of facilitation across languages that do not share script.