Psychological Development and Education ›› 2013, Vol. 29 ›› Issue (1): 54-60.

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Activation of Non-target words During Chinese-English Bilinguals’ Language Production

CHANG Song1, WANG Rui-ming1, LI Li2, XIE Jiu-shu1   

  1. 1. Center for Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631;
    2. College of International Culture, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631
  • Online:2013-01-15 Published:2013-01-15

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Abstract: Whether words within the lexicon of the non-used language are activated during language production is an important question in bilingual research. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results in this question, because activation could have been artificially induced by the experiment paradigms and nothing is known about the activation of non-target words in the non-used language. Colomé and Miozzo(2010) used a suitable paradigm—picture-picture interference paradigm to study this issue. They found that for proficient bilinguals, non-target words were activated in the non-used language. But, whether co-activation can be found while less-proficient bilinguals use their first language or second language was still in debates. Moreover, if the co-activation could be found, it is clear that second language words' familiarity has regulated the activation. This will be an important finding in bilingual language production. Here, picture-picture interference paradigm was used to investigate to what extent non-target words are activated in less-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals during language production. Experiment 1 was designed to examine whether the English names of distracter pictures could be activated when participants were required to name the target pictures in Chinese, which is their first language. The results demonstrated that non-target words of high familiarity can be activated in less-proficient Chinese-English bilinguals, but not those of low familiarity. Experiment 2 explored whether the Chinese names of distracter pictures would be activated when participants were asked to name target pictures in English, which is their second language. The finding was that the non-target words can be activated regardless of their familiarity. Overall, these findings demonstrated that less-proficient bilinguals were affected by their familiarity of non-target words as well as language proficiency in both languages during language production.

Key words: the picture-picture interference task, bilinguals, language production, non-target words

CLC Number: 

  • G442
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