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Bilingual Language Processing

The increasing global prevalence of bilingualism has led to a growing interest in how bilinguals process language. Research on bilingual language processing focuses on bilingual comprehension and production skills. The study of these topics has helped researchers answer a variety of questions, including the following: Can bilinguals ever “turn off” one of their languages? How are words and translations interconnected in bilingual memory? What word and learner characteristics influence the way words are represented and processed? To address these questions, researchers employ a number of tasks, some of which are discussed in this entry. Also discussed is the nature of bilingual memory representation and how it is influenced by learner and word characteristics. Models of bilingual memory representation are considered in the context of these issues.

Tasks

A number of tasks are used to examine bilingual language processing. In some of these tasks, the speed and accuracy with which people respond are used to infer how words are represented in bilingual memory and/or how these representations are accessed. In the “translation production” task, a word is presented in one language to be translated aloud into another language. “Translation recognition” is a similar task, wherein a pair of words is presented to be judged as correct or incorrect translations. In the “picture naming” task, a line drawing is presented to be named in a given language. In the “lexical decision” task, a letter string is presented to be judged a real word or a nonword in a given language. Finally, in the “priming” task, a prime is shown (typically very briefly), followed by a target, to which an individual must make a response (usually, a lexical decision). Using words of various types in these tasks allows researchers to infer how these kinds of words are represented and accessed.

In some cases, these tasks are performed following a sentence context, often to determine the way context affects how words are processed. Other tasks specifically examine sentence-level processing. The “self-paced reading” task involves presentation of a sentence one word at a time, paced by the bilingual. The “grammaticality judgment” task involves presenting a sentence for a judgment about grammatical acceptability. Both of these tasks allow researchers to examine bilinguals' sensitivity to grammar in their two languages, often by including violations of grammar.

Selective/Nonselective Access

A prominent theme in bilingual language processing research is whether bilinguals are able to “turn off” one of their languages when they are using the other exclusively (i.e., can they selectively access one language?). This issue has been explored using several tasks that provide converging evidence; some of these tasks exploit the relationship between words in the two languages to determine whether both languages are accessed. Although initially the question of interest was whether bilinguals typically access only one language at a time, current research aims to understand when such selective access is likely to occur and what circumstances increase its likelihood. Some research on this issue suggests that bilinguals can more easily “turn off” a weaker language than a very dominant language (e.g., their first language).

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