Lexical access and competition in bilingual children: The role of proficiency, literacy and structural similarity

Non-selective language access has often been shown in studies using visually presented words that share some features across languages, such as false friends. However, not much research has focused on auditory processing, especially in early and balanced bilinguals. This study examined how languages are accessed and organised and affect one another in bilingual children in a picture-auditory word recognition task with false friends and semantically related words, with particular reference to differences for participants in proficiency, grade level, literacy and the similarity of the two languages. In Study 1 we analysed the performance of two groups of school-age bilingual children with Italian as their L1 and German as their L2, but with different proficiency levels in their L2. In Study 2 we compared two groups of unbalanced bilingual children with Italian as their L1 and either French or German as their L2 to investigate how the degree of similarity between the L1 and L2 affected the test results. Accuracy and speed in general and in responding to the critical conditions were compared to the control conditions within and across languages, grades, and levels of reading experience. Bilinguals showed ‘interference’ when presented with false friends, thus showing that language activation happens simultaneously and incrementally upon receiving an auditory stimulus. Performance in false friends in one language was affected by proficiency level in the other, by the degree of similarity between the L1 and L2, and by orthographic knowledge, and in semantically related words by a combination of a large enough vocabulary and relatively little experience with the language. The bilinguals’ language access in general was affected by each of the several factors tested - proficiency, experience, similarity and literacy in the L1 and the L2.