Orthographic neighborhood effects in bilingual word recognition

A series of progressive demasking and lexical decision experiments investigated how the recognition of target words exclusively belonging to one language is affected by the existence of orthographic neighbors from the same or the other language of bilingual participants. Increasing the number of orthographic neighbors in Dutch systematically slowed response times to English target words in Dutch/English bilinguals, while an increase in target language neighbors consistently produced inhibitory effects for Dutch and facilitatory effects for English target words. Monolingual English speakers also showed facilitation due to English neighbors, but no effect of Dutch neighbors. The experiments provide evidence for parallel activation of words in an integrated Dutch/English lexicon. An implemented version of such a model making these assumptions, the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model, is shown to account for the overall pattern of results. (C) 1998 Academic Press.