How letter order is encoded in bilingual reading? The role of deviant-letter position in cognate word recognition

Objective: Previous literature in the monolingual domain has showed that letter position is
not encoded in an absolute-position manner. However, with the exception of the
unpublished work by Font [(2001). Rôle de la langue dansl’accès au lexique chez les bilingues:
Influence de la proximité orthographique et sémantique interlangue surla reconnaissance visuelle
de mots (Unpublished Doctoral thesis). Université Paul Valery, Montpellier)], there is no study
investigating this issue with bilinguals. According to Font, the recognition of cognate words
is affected by the position of the deviant letter. This calls the validity of the input-coding
scheme of the most relevant computational model of bilingual word recognition (The
Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus Model [BIA+; Dijkstra, T., & vanHeuven, W. J. (2002). The
architecture of the bilingual word recognition system: From identification to decision.
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 5, 175–197. doi:10.1017/S1366728902003012; Dijkstra,
T., Miwa, K., Brummelhuis, B., Sappelli, M., & Baayen, H. (2010). How cross-language similarity
and task demands affect cognate recognition. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 284–301.
doi:10.1016/j.jml.2009.12.003]) into question, since it holds that letter positions are perfectly
encoded. The aim of the present research was to further examine the way letter position is
encoded during non-native reading by manipulating the deviant-letter position of European
Portuguese (EP)-English (EN) cognate words.
Method: To that purpose 288 stimuli (144 Portuguese-English translation words [72 cognates
and 72 noncognates] and 144 pseudowords) were selected. Cognates were assigned to two
experimental conditions according to deviant-letter position: 1) at end of the word (matriz-
MATRIX); and 2) at the beginning of the word (coala-KOALA). A third condition varying both
at the beginning and at the end (e.g., escala-SCALE) was also included as a control to test
how the degree of cross-language overlap modulates the results. Twenty-eight proficient
Portuguese-English bilinguals were asked to perform a masked priming lexical decision task
in English.
Results: The results revealed faster responses for cognates with greater degree of crosslanguage
overlap (Conditions 1 and 2). More important, priming effects were not modulated
by deviant-letter position, i.e., the size of priming was similar across condition 1 and 2.
Conclusion: Although a priori, no amendments seems to be needed in the “front-end” of the
coding scheme of the BIA+ model when cognate words are considered, future studies
should be developed in order to explore if these results are restricted to outer deviant-letters.
FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(IF/00784/2013/cp1158/ct0013)
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion