READING RATE, ARTICULATORY SUPPRESSION AND BILINGUAL DIGIT SPAN

Articulatory suppression eliminated differences in bilingual digit span for balanced English-Spanish bilinguals and Chinese-dominant, Chinese-English bilinguals. The findings do not support da Costa Pinto's (1991) superiority of the mother tongue hypothesis, and suggest this phenomenon occurs when fluency in the second language is low. Additional findings show that in the auditory modality, maintaining articulatory suppression 4 sec after presentation is sufficient to remove the effects of word length and that language of suppression phrase does not affect suppressed digit span.